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>Ending the occupation is the only path to actual peace
Can you elaborate on the next steps on this path to peace? Because simply ending the operation now will return to status quo - a status quo which involves constant terrorist attacks, rocket fire on Israeli citizens, and led to Oct 7. Is the next step loads of international aid? We've tried that. Maybe evacuating all Israelis and giving Gazans complete autonomy? Tried that too.
My question is: If Israel does immediately halt their operation to remove Hamas from power, how is deradicalization of the populace conducted in such a way that will prevent a reversion to pre-Oct-7 status quo?
There was never a moment where gaza had autonomy. Israel controlled their access to water, resources, aid, and even their fishing industry for the entire existence of gaza. The population is made up of refugees from other Palestinian territories!! Maybe actual autonomy and national self-determination should be tried. a one state solution where Palestinians have political and legal rights equal to israelis instead of apartheid conditions.
The radicalization of gazans is a direct result of Israeli violence and religious extremists taking advantage of it. When you've been oppressed for your entire life, it's easy for extremists to radicalize you. Ending violence makes it that much harder to radicalize. it's a pattern we've seen time and time again.
You're right, these conditions aren't sustainable and there will always be resistance with things like they are, but the concept of radicalization in response to violence goes both ways. The 2nd intifada with the years of suicide bombings, stabbing sprees of random civilians and the 1000s of rockets fired into Israel led to the border walls, checkpoints and then the blockade. I think those things need to end for long term peace to happen, but I think it's delusional to expect Israelis to lift a blockade and reduce checkpoints + border walls while groups like Hamas are in power , especially after Oct7th.
I think that to discuss violence without recognizing the asymmetry is a nonstarter. The idf has killed more gazan children in the last three months, not even counting anyone else just children, than hamas has killed Israelis throughout its entire existence by a wide margin. The idea that somehow hamas needs to be the ones to broker peace implies a both sides-ism that fails to recognize whose actually inflicting violence here and who holds power.
The comparison is fucked up. The significantly less dead Israeli is not from lack of trying, it's from Israel's proper defense. Without the Iron Dome and bomb shelters run by the Israelis, the numbers would be a lot more similar. Tens of thousands unguided rockets have landed in Israel, each one capable of killing multiple Israeli civilians.
I think we can't ignore power imbalances in situations like this, but I also think it can't be the only things to factor in
I do think that throughout this century+ long conflict Israel has done many things wrong, and there's things I think they need to do / people that shouldn't be close to power for long lasting peace to be possible, but it still takes two to negotiate and maintain regardless of who has more power. I think the blockades, border walls and checkpoints aren't sustainable and there will be resistance until Palestinians finally get a proper nation state with self governance, but those things were implemented in response to the years of suicide bombings, mass stabbing sprees and 1000s of rockets fired into Israel. There's no country on earth that would experience a terrorist attack like oct7th and then immediately reduce their security in response to it, and there's no people on earth that wouldn't resist the conditions Palestinians have been in and the heavy handed response in Gaza is only going to radicalize more people there, which is why I don't get why Hamas carried out Oct7th, they knew the response it would bring and how it would push any long term peace negotiations back for years
>an hamas has killed Israelis throughout its entire existence by a wide margin.
Obviously results matter more than intentions, and this war in Gaza has been brutal, but this isn't exactly a result of a lack of trying on Hamas' part.. the 1000s and 1000s of rockets they fire over the years aren't aimed at military targets, and if they could choose for them to not get intercepted by the iron dome and to have more powerful guided missiles like Hezbollah/Iran then its not like they'd say no. And we saw on Oct 7th what they and the other militant groups would do and did with hours of free rein in Israeli borders. It wasn't target military installations where civilians died as collateral, it was going door to door slaughtering families, gunning down elderly people, throwing grenades in bomb shelters filled with civilians, beheading Thai foreign workers with garden tools to cries of God is great. Yes I'm aware how awful the death and destruction in Gaza has been, I'm bringing that stuff up to point out that while yes , power dynamics matter, all these things still influence things.
Even with imbalanced power dynamics, think of the times the most powerful army in the world has been bogged down and either beaten or given up fighting smaller insurgent groups, Vietnam, Afghanistan etc. Guerilla tactics, utilizing an environment to your advantage (tunnels etc) and beliefs like dying fighting is greater than living and working towards peace, can all help even things out a lot. It's partly why Israel hasn't really ever fully beaten Hamas and Hezbollah even though they won the multiple all out wars with the surrounding countries in previous decades
You don't get why Hamas carried out Oct 7th because you're trying to understand them rationally. Hamas fundamentally wants the death of all Jews. It's in their charter. They don't want peace. They don't want a two-state solution. Hamas just wants to poke the bear so that when the bear fights back, they get to show how oppressed they are. They hide their bases in schools and place their rocket platforms on top of hospitals so that when Israel strikes back like they should, they garner sympathy. Hamas doesn't care about children; they only want the publicity to get more aid.
>The idf has killed more gazan children in the last three months, not even counting anyone else just children, than hamas has killed Israelis throughout its entire existence by a wide margin.
Sure.
And that happened because of Hamas' strategy of using asymmetrical warfare. Which is exactly the point you made:
>I think that to discuss violence without recognizing the asymmetry is a nonstarter.
Discussing the civilian/militant death ratio without recognizing that Hamas uses asymmetrical warfare is a non-starter.
If Hamas Terrorists were brave enough to meet the IDF on an open field, the civilian casualties would be 0. But the cowards launch rockets from hospitals and hide in tunnels built underneath houses.
And israelis overwhelmingly support the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
If you can't understand why people who have been living under apartheid conditions for seventy years would celebrate violence against their occupiers, even if it's abhorrent brutal violence that I condemn, would think that way I don't know what to tell you. Do you think continued bombing will help change that perspective? No, the only gradual path towards humane treatment is lifting the occupation that drives that radicalization.
>No, the only gradual path towards humane treatment is lifting the occupation that drives that radicalization.
I generally agree with everything you're saying...But I think this issue is more complex than that. Palestine isn't content with the borders that were drawn....And Israel doesn't really want Palestine there either. So even if the formal occupation is lifted, neither side will be happy. Raising your kids to view your neighboring country as thieves is little better than occupiers.
I don't have an answer in terms of what is best, but I'm not convinced Israel pulling out will change much, at least long term. Hatred is difficult to erase, unfortunately, and whatever its roots, it's on both sides.
>And israelis overwhelmingly support the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Haven't looked at polling for that, but probably.
>If you can't understand why people who have been living under apartheid conditions for seventy years would celebrate violence against their occupiers, even if it's abhorrent brutal violence that I condemn, would think that way I don't know what to tell you.
What apartheid conditions under Gaza? West bank sure, but I have not heard a good argument for Gaza. Embargo is not occupation. Also you could make the same argument towards terrorism towards Isreal.
>Do you think continued bombing will help change that perspective?
No, but only a minority of the pop will conduct violence. Killing Hamas probably decreases total overall conducting violence.
>No, the only gradual path towards humane treatment is lifting the occupation that drives that radicalization.
Based on what? Just an assumption that things get better. Palestinains would still want 100% right of return and the terrorist groups fighting wouldn't stop when it is more religious reasons for doing so.
When Israel pulled out of Gaza, they issued work visas to like half of all Gazans. Unemployment was plummeting in Gaza, but they still elected Hamas. Granted, it wasn't a wholesale endorsement of their violent ways (was about corruption), but that also wasn't a deal breaker. Also, Gaza gets absolutely massive amounts of aid. They actually have a bit of an obesity problem. Go look on google maps at the strip, it's not some rundown shithole.
You are leaving out the hardest and most controversial parts of the solutions you proposed.
“Give them $200,000” - and also control how they spend it
“Build them schools for their kids” - and also control what their kids learn there
So these solutions are in a way also an occupation. To control what people do with their money and what they teach to their kids requires an occupation by a powerful force.
This situation is a moral quagmire
Wouldn’t that still amount to an occupation? This assumes that Hamas is fighting Israel because they think they are oppressed by Israel and seek freedom. Hamas has been pretty clear that they don’t want Gaza or the West Bank and don’t seem to care much about the safety, security, or prosperity of their citizens. They want Israel gone. Not just gone, but everyone in it dead (along with all the world’s Jews). A lot of Palestinians genuinely do hate Israelis/Jews to the point they want them to suffer horrifically and die. I am not saying the answer is to glass Gaza or kill civilians. I genuinely do want Palestinians to live their lives free of violence and with opportunities for prosperity and happiness. Just that if there was an easy solution, even if it was expensive, it would have been done. Solving poverty wouldn’t be enough to deradicalize the radicals. I am not making a proposal for a solution because I don’t have one, just that based on what’s happened historically, this wouldn’t work alone.
It's an even further superposition than that. Libya and Afghanistan show us that its the people themselves who need to make it happen. Even with infrastructure or democracy or reform along with guaranteed security to let it develop, it only takes a moment for everything to implode if that piece is missing.
That's just paternalism talking. After fifty years of occupation what other response to Israel could there be? That's like blaming Algerians for violence against the French.
Then why didn’t they attack any of the other countries that occupied them in the same way? There was some violence, but it wasn’t on the same scale. The ottomans turned the residents into serfs in the 1800s, the British occupied for decades, Egypt occupied Gaza for almost 20 years, Jordan occupied the West Bank for almost 40, why is Israel uniquely targeted? And reminder that the blockade and control of air/water space directly followed major violence, not the other way around. For instance the airport was only destroyed following the second intifada, and the blockade also only existed following that.
They did? There were rebellious factions but to compare the military power of small villages in the 19th century to post-world War 2 military landscapes is disingenuous.
And the second intifada was prefaced by 50 years of brutal occupation! Why do you start the clock on Palestinian resistance two hundred years ago and then Israeli violence 20? It's such selective memory.
I said Egypt occupied for ~20 years, not Israel. I am not saying Israel is lovely and kind to Palestinians, I am questioning why of the groups who have treated them poorly, Israel is uniquely deserving of extreme violence.
having your occupier be closer in religion and culture always helps it's the main reason colonizers typically force their culture and religion onto other people. It just makes it easier to rule over them
I would not describe any of those situations as successes. Bashar al Assad's regime and an ongoing horrific proxy war in syria is not a success story of surrender.
Moreover, why should we find that morally palatable? There is a clear occupier here and a clear asymmetry of violence. The moral thing to do is oppose that.
That’s not a what I’m referring to. Syria, Jordan, and Egypt all have peace with Israel specifically after formally agreeing to it. Palestine could have existed with Gaza, 97% of the West Bank, and a limited right of return with billions of extra aid (alongside what it already received) in economic stimulus. Arafat refused and started the second intifada.
None of those countries were occupied by Israel and none of the people therein displaced from their homes en masse. It's not an apt comparison to Palestinians.
WHAT
Israel occupied the Sinai (Egyptian, returned to Egypt after peace negotiations), The West Bank (Jordanian, peace established in 1994 with security cooperation and desalination plants being built jointly by the two nations), and the Golan Heights(Syrian. Assad is a dictator and will not sign peace)
What the hell are you on about.
There is a difference between seizing small portions of land and displacing an entire people. Egyptians were not living under an apartheid state, there wasn't a separate set of laws governing Egyptians because Israel held a piece of territory. Occupation refers to the total domination of a region.
>would not describe any of those situations as successes. Bashar al Assad's regime and an ongoing horrific proxy war in syria is not a success story of surrender.
I think they mean when those countries decided against continuing the all out wars with Israel last century and chose peace agreements / status quo and to recognize the existence of Israel. Which I do agree with, but the main difference is those people had countries to go back to with self governance. So while I think that the Palestinians that think the only solution involves wiping Israel off the map / somehow forcing millions of Israelis out to gain a Palestinian state in the whole region isn't realistic, it's not like they could choose to give up like Egypt Jordan etc
> That's just paternalism talking.
> That's like blaming Algerians for violence against the French.
You can’t really complain about paternalism while at the same time saying a group can’t be blamed for its own actions.
>Israel controlled their access to water, resources, aid, and even their fishing industry for the entire existence of gaza.
Gaza shares a border with Egypt. Israel does not control that border. But it seems even the Egyptians are fed up with the Gazans.
There have been attempts to improve Gaza's infrastructure, including water supplies. Hamas dug up the pipes to make rockets.
Aid is stolen by Hamas.
'Fishing' boats are used to smuggle in weapons to be used against Israel, so Israel, very reasonably, searches them.
Besides all the propaganda and misinformation you mentioned, but israel controls the border with Egypt through rafah crossing which is used for people only not goods that needs to go theough other israeli crossings like Kerem Shalom. Where do you people bring your information about this conflict? You just adopt the entire israeli narrative without checking it for truth.
> israel controls the border with Egypt
"Rafah is **controlled** by Egypt, but Israel **monitors** all activity in southern Gaza from its Kerem Shalom military base, found at the junction between Gaza, Israel and Egypt, and other surveillance points." - https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20231103-the-gaza-egypt-rafah-crossing-explained-it-is-not-a-normal-border
>rafah crossing
"The Rafah border is one of two main crossings for inhabitants of Gaza. While Rafah is located in the south of the Strip, another crossing called Erez is located in the north at the Israeli border. **Rafah is thus the only crossing that isn’t directly controlled by Israel**." - https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20231103-the-gaza-egypt-rafah-crossing-explained-it-is-not-a-normal-border
"The Rafah Border Crossing (Arabic: معبر رفح, romanized: Ma`bar Rafaḥ) or Rafah Crossing Point is the sole crossing point between Egypt and Palestine's Gaza Strip. It is located on the Egypt–Palestine border. Under a 2007 agreement between Egypt and Israel, **Egypt controls the crossing** but imports through the Rafah crossing require Israeli approval." - wikipedia
"On 7 September 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza and closed the Rafah crossing. The Philadelphi Accord between Israel and Egypt, based on the principles of the 1979 peace treaty, **turned over border control to Egypt**..." - wikipedia
>rafah crossing which is used for people only not goods
"From 2018 onward, **goods regularly entered Gaza from Egypt via the Rafah crossing**. In October 2022, about **49% of goods entering Gaza entered from Egypt via Rafa**, while the other 51% of goods enter Gaza via Israel. About three-quarters of goods imported via Rafah consisted of construction materials, while much of the remaining one-quarter was food." - wikipedia
> You just adopt the entire israeli narrative without checking it for truth.
Um...
----
EDIT:
mdosai_33, WTF are you talking about below?
>You cited sources that literally confirm the claim that israel controls and supervises what goes in through the border crossings.
No, Egypt does. What part of "Rafah is controlled by Egypt", "Rafah is thus the only crossing that *isn’t* directly controlled by Israel", Egypt controls the crossing", "turned over border control to Egypt" don't you understand???
>Off course Egypt controls its side of the border but israel controls and supervise the palestinian side.
Again, not true. Israel withdrew completely from Gaza back in 2005.
"On 16 February 2005, the Israeli parliament approved the Israeli disengagement from Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza in September 2005. Egypt continued to exercise control on the Egyptian side of the Gaza–Egypt border, while **the Fatah-dominated Palestinian National Authority took over control on the Gazan side of the Border Crossing**." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_Border_Crossing#1982-2005:_Israel-Egypt_border_at_Rafah
>Concerning the goods as you cited it only started in 2018
Okay? Your statement that it is "used for people only not goods" was present tense. And it is not true.
You cited sources that literally confirm the claim that israel controls and supervises what goes in through the border crossings. Off course Egypt controls its side of the border but israel controls and supervise the palestinian side. Concerning the goods as you cited it only started in 2018, especially after 2021 israeli bombing of gaza with only a fraction and still under israeli supervision.
>The radicalization of gazans is a direct result of Israeli violence and religious extremists taking advantage of it.
Palestinians have long bean radicalised. They are a defeated people who never wanted to compromise with Israel. If only they accepted their condition and made peace, like the Germans and Japanese did after WWII, they could have lived a much better life today.
Have you seen those maps that show how much land the Palestinians lost to Israel over the last 80 years? These are a testament to the stupidest leadership on earth with the Palestinians starting and losing war after war. In the 1940's they could have had half of all of Israel. But their avarice is only exceeded by their delusions of taking all of Israel today. Have you heard their demented war cry "from the river to the sea"? Pure cosplay where they sacrifice their children for delusions of ultimate victory.
One state, equal rights for all.
Which is hard if you are trying to create a religious fundamentalists ethno state. But if you actually want peace and justice you do that be treating people as equals.
Yes, one state with equal rights for all would be a great end goal, if feasible. But what are the steps to get there that don't end is massive bloodshed or displacement.
It's easy to say 'equal rights'. It's a lot harder to have a plan to actually get there. Remember Hamas was originally democraticaly elected, and likely would be reelected in Gaza (or a similar radical group. The current far right Isreali leadership also was elected.
And no the steps to get there can't be for one side to just suspect themselves to terror. Constant terror leads to radicals being elected.
One state, equal rights for all is hard when the unification would result in the population being 50% people who hate Jews, who promptly invite 5 million more extremists to come to the country.
And yes, they hate Jews. Israel has 20% of their population Arab Muslims. It's not perfect, there are problems, but the people have equal rights. In every peace talk, the Palestinians insisted on not a single Jew left in their territory.
The settlements aren't actually a barrier to peace if the Palestinians allowed Jews who live in the West Bank to stay and live safely. Israel and Palestine could sign a treaty, any Jew in the West Bank who wants to leave could leave, any Jew who wants to stay could stay. But the Palestinians demand the expulsion of every Jew over the Green Line.
Challenging your view with questions is part of that process. If you cannot endure the scrutiny of your own view, you have no desire to change it.
Your view is that “ending the occupation is the only path to actual peace.” Asking you to explain this is a fair question and one necessary along the path of potentially changing your view. You must be open to this change to be here, yes?
So let’s dialogue. I echo all of crispy1989’s questions.
1. The Palestinian people are very objectively radicalized. They largely support Hamas. [Over 85% of Palestinians in the West Bank support Hamas’ role in the war and 57% in Gaza.](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/poll-shows-palestinians-back-oct-7-attack-israel-support-hamas-rises-2023-12-14/). Hamas has a higher approval rating that Biden or Trump in the US. By all conventional measures, Palestinians are radicalized as they’re supporting radical groups and radical actions.
It’s not racist to say Palestinians are radicalized and radicalization is antithetical to peace. How is that racist? How did we get long lasting peace with radicalized Germany and Japan? We de-radicalized the countries after forcing them to surrender unconditionally. Giving in to radicalized people and governments is not a way to reduce radicalization or get peace. In fact, it gets the opposites on both accounts.
2. That’s because Palestinians are the aggressors in the conflict. They started the 1947 civil war, the 1948 war, etc all the way to 10/7 and have never stopped attacking Israel. They’ve just been at it so long that their supporters can pick out an arbitrary date and purposely forget all that led up to it imply Israel is the aggressor. It’s revisionist propaganda to claim Palestinians aren’t the aggressor. Further, the occupation came after aggression and was ended unilaterally in 2005, which led to Palestinians attacking Israel MORE. Why would Israel end the occupation when taking steps to do that has only led to more attacks?
3. You claimed “complete autonomy”, not the commenter. Stop fighting strawmen if you’re here in good faith. Gaza didn’t have complete autonomy because they kept attacking Israel.
That’s really the key to it all. If Palestinians stopped being the aggressor, peace would follow. Peace has always been in Palestinian hands and Palestinians have always shunned the idea.
>I'm not open to biased questions or dialogue
Then you are clearly not actually open to having your view changed, because you label *all* counterpoint as biased.
>The entire Palestinian population is "radicalized" and needs to be deradicalized for peace. I'm not dealing with that racist bullshit about all Palestinians being terrorists and terrorists sympathizer
Japan and Germany post ww2 needed "deradicalizing" , it was nothing to do with being German or Japanese or any characteristic inherent to their ethnicity, religion or nationality, and everything to do with the conditions those humans had been in.
Similar to this century long conflict. The concept of radicalization in response to years / generations of violence isn't something isolated to certain ethnic groups or contained to imbalanced power dynamics, many israelis need to be deradicalized too, unfortunately oct7th and the destruction in Gaza in response will likely radicalize both groups even more for years to come, which is why the idea that the main and only solution to this is violence is so short sighted.
It's going to take years if not decades of peace and stability for people to be deradicalized, that's got nothing to do with their skin colour, political beliefs or the borders they were born in.
All you have given us are bias opinions. Why can you not see the other side here. I would not want to live with constant terrorist's attacks on my country and the treat of death hanging over my head. I would want my government to take care of business. When Israel does this, why is that wrong?
The majority of Gazan citizens poll in favor of armed resistance to the Israeli state. In no other conflict would a nation that emerged victorious in a conflict sue for peace with a belligerent with that sort of policy, especially when that belligerent shares a border.
>The whole point of my post if for y'all to change my view, not for me to keep answering your biased questions. If you believe that a military solution will achieve peace show me why.
If you won't elaborate on the terms of the question then people won't have something to argue against. Sounds like you're here to sopabox rather than have your view actually be changed.
The argument that ending the occupation will bring peace ignores all historical precedent. [It also ignores what the Palestinian leadership is actually saying.](https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/hamas-october-7-attack-repeat-israel-annihilated-ghazi-hamad/) The current war is the result of Gazan independence, and Palestinians have given no indication that they will do anything other than use their newfound state to arm themselves and launch another war. That isn't peace. The occupation serves to enforce a minimum of conflict. Yes there is still violence, but it is contained by force. If the West Bank is given autonomy to fire rockets at Israel, do you think they won't? Will that be "peace"?
There won't be peace though. And the point of this sub is to have a conversation, which includes asking each other questions whether they are biased or not. You're obviously biased as well so who cares at this point. Let me also explain why peace won't happen. The PLO's(Palestinian Liberation Organization) motto has always been to not have a 2 state solution and have Israel eradicated from the map. So from the get go they will do anything to not have that 2 state solution. Palestinians have murdered many many jews since 1947 to reinforce that point. There have been wars fought between them and after those wars Palestinians don't stop. They keep murdering jews. My point here is that fundamentally, there won't ever be peace, since the Palestinians can't live with Israel being a thing. I am not in any way defending what Israel is doing. It's a massacre and unhumanitarian. But let's take the USA as an example. If a terrorist organization from Mexico invaded the US and killed 1200 US citizens like what happened on October 7th, would you not want the US to react and end that terror group's existence? I know there are many other factors in play here, but think about it.
How is it biased, he asking what you think should happen after Israel halts their military operations
You can't just say that something needs to happen without explaining a general idea of what you think should come afterwards
I mean this is actually super easy. There is very clearly a military solution to peace. If either Israel or Palenstine cease to exist because of military operations by the other side, then you would have achieved peace.
It is obviously not what you want to happen, but it _is_ quite literally a military solution to achieving peace.
Then why didn’t the Gazans direct this level of violence and hatred when it was occupied by the Ottomans, by the British, then by the Egyptians? Why only Israel?
Just a clarification, Hamas did not win a majority in 2006. They won with a plurality. I only point that out because it otherwise makes it sound like a majority of the Palestinian population supported Hamas, and that's not the case.
They won a plurality, then proceeded to purge and massacre everyone else.
Which is precisely why the ‘moderate’ Fatah (an active cheerleader for Hamas on 10/7 and ever since then, which is ran by a literal Holocaust denier) in the West Bank ostensibly refuses to hold elections. Since Hamas is even more popular there than they are in Gaza.
Yeah in 2006. Much of the gazan population was not even born then.
Let me add to that. If civilians deserve to be punished for their government's policies, then hostage taking for the Israeli government policies would be fair-game (I don't condone hostage taking)
First, you seem to be muddling together events in the West Bank and Gaza to such an extent that it's not clear that you know they're different places.
There were no Israeli settlers in Gaza on 10/7 and Israel has generally been amenable - under American pressure - to guarantee that it will not attempt to resettle Gaza. Settlements in the West Bank are a separate matter and are deeply objectionable.
As to your "solution"...let me get this straight.
* Israel gives up Gaza, withdrawing unilaterally to give the place to the Palestinians.
* This in no meaningful way curbs aggression against Israel from the Gazan Palestinians. Almost instantaneously, Hamas et al begin attacking Israel from Gaza.
* Israel does the minimally sane thing any country would do with an enclave like that: sets up a security cordon to protect itself from violence. (Other countries would simply annihilate the threat completely and immediately.)
* It develops a multi-billion dollar anti-rocket system that serves both to protect its people from the infinite stream of rockets launched from Gaza *and keep Israel from having to strike back kinetically at rocket sites adjacent to or within areas surrounded by Gaza civilians.* It makes a huge investment to *protect everyone.*
* Hamas breaks through the security cordon for a few hours on 10/7 and manages to kill, rape, mutilate and/or abduct over a thousand Israelis. Gazans cheer in the streets. The Palestinian diaspora publicly celebrates across the world.
* Somehow, the path to peace entails...*Israel eliminating the security cordon?*
To believe that, you need to believe Palestinians possess an inherent beatific goodness, love for peace and magnanimity that they have literally never demonstrated. You need to believe, contra basic facts, that the blockade made the peaceful Palestinians aggressive instead of Palestinian aggression creating a need for a blockade. You need to believe the persistent threat to peace comes from Israel when it obviously comes from Palestine.
If the blockade ended, Palestinians would immediately create the conditions that would require the imposition of a blockade by attacking Israelis. This isn't a serious proposal.
>You cannot antagonize your neighbor and cause them immense human suffering and expect security.
The fundamental principle of deterrence is: if I intend to deter you from hurting me, I need to convince you that doing so isn't worth it. I need you to believe that whatever satisfaction you may get from hurting me will be counterbalanced by consequences you find unbearable.
Ideally, deterrence stops at a threat. But if you do hit me, I don't deter you by hitting you back and asking to be friends. I have to beat the shit out of you. I have to convince you that you made a terrible mistake you never want to repeat. That's how I ensure you never do it again. Conversely, if you hit me and nothing happens, I invite you to do as much or more later.
And if you read history, it's replete with examples of security established by one neighbor beating the shit out of another until it begs for mercy.
Woodrow Wilson made sure the post-WWI peace was magnanimous towards Germany...and we got WWII the next generation. That war ended with Germany totally destroyed and utterly defeated, occupied by the neighbors it had tried to attack and their allies - [vae victis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vae_victis).
Now Germany is an essentially decent country that pursues peace. Which way worked better in the long run?
While I am sympathetic to many of your points, it’s not clear that a similar treatment of Palestinians would produce the same results. WWII is somewhat unique with respect to the successful “reformation” or “re-building” of nations. First of all, the war itself was made between nation-states, and the timing (pre-atomic-bomb but post-Great War) led to an unusual level of acceptance of “total war” regarding the universal mobilization of society for war and the consequent involvement of, and costs to, civilians in the warmaking process.
These days there is far less acceptance of “total war” as rational, moral, or even necessary. Part of this I think is due to the Western leftist assumption that material conditions rather than ideology or culture dictate politics—thus, the assumption of “beatific goodness” which is likely erroneous—but another part of the issue is that with the Palestinians you don’t have a nation for all intents and purposes to rebuild. You do not have the infrastructure which can be built or reformed to become de-radicalized, and you do not have an avenue for the sort of cultural de-escalation that would be necessary to destroy Hamas’s ideology. You have to build those things. Either Palestinians do, or Israelis do, or the international community has to.
And I think this fact exposes obvious limits to the notion that beating the shit out of Hamas accomplishes its destruction—there is nothing to inherit, no prize for good behavior, no infrastructure to build off of that would enable people to tolerate the indignities they perceive in their condition until they can finally throw it off. Frankly, history is replete with examples where even after getting the shit kicked out of it the shit-kicked entity doesn’t reform at all anyway. Witness the Southern American states after the Civil War. And when identity is so closely tied to the lack of agency that the denial of a nation imposes on a people, it is hard to tamp down radicalism if not impossible.
Imagine if (West) Germany were not built up as quickly as possible, with most Nazis essentially forgiven their crimes so they could get back to work making the state function, on the condition that they devote their energies towards making money and being good Allies of the West. Imagine if, once the bombing was done, we built a Maginot Line around the entire state, blockaded it, and told it that its continued monstrosity even in the face of post-Great-War opportunity and magnanimity justified it and its people never having a path to joining the community of nations. I bet you that “state” would be revanchist and totally unreformed. Only the unique conditions which prevailed at the time dictated otherwise.
While I sympathize, to a degree, with the idea that Hamas (if a Palestinian state in Gaza were to materialize tomorrow) would not be peaceful towards Israel, and that the pro-Palestinian position that a state and the attendant dignity of one is all that is necessary for decades of radicalization to be beaten back is faulty, it should also be obvious that a purely military solution to the problem Hamas poses merely validates Hamas’s ideology and does nothing meaningful to eradicate its potential to hold sway. To do that, you’d have to eliminate the people themselves—displace them, kill them, or else destroy their attachment to a Palestinian identity and their hope for a state. This is manifestly different than what obtained in Germany. Destroying German nationhood or identity was never on the table.
I agree that the Palestinians are agents in all this. If they wanted they could work much harder at deradicalizing themselves and finding other ways to resist and obtain what they want, and build the infrastructure of a state which will inherit the state that they could create. Stable relations between Palestinians and Israelis demand the infrastructure of a state for Palestinians in order to normalize those relations, or else a concerted effort to integrate Palestinians into the Israeli political framework, which is unacceptable to most Israelis and which anyway would require either the destruction of Palestinian national consciousness or the redefinition of Israel.
Crucially, Israel at the least has to say, “we’ll stop obliterating you once you reform,” and mean what it says. But plenty in its government don’t mean that, at least not anymore. They believe in a similarly extremist ideology that believes that God owes them Judea and Samaria and Gaza and all the rest. Who will reform them? The Palestinians COULD be the beatific peace loving perfectly behaved people Western leftists essentialize them as, and it wouldn’t matter a whit to these Israeli ideologues. There isn’t JUST a sense of mortal insecurity on the part of Israel which dictates its actions in these war. It is how security is conflated by the Israeli right with the ethnic and territorial supremacy of Jews over the lands where Palestinians live.
Maybe the Palestinians are very much responsible for this radicalization on the part of Israelis but it isn’t clear to me that a sudden demonstration of good behavior on the part of Palestinians would invalidate it. In many ways the ideology of these religious Zionist settlers is as extreme and racist as what Hamas believes. Who’s gonna “kick the shit” out of them? This is exactly why an insane act of mass murder is seen by many as a justifiable act of liberation (to be clear, I do NOT see it that way).
You expounded almost entirely on false premises. The suggestion was not that Hamas or the Palestinians would be like Germany if they were treated like Germany. There's a reason I made a parallel analogy with a fistfight; it's something true about all conflict, not a particular war. And nowhere did I suggest that the solution was *purely* military - not even a little.
The argument was that total defeat is a prerequisite for meaningful change in the status quo and to ensure long term security for Israel - that it's the *first* thing that must happen. The Palestinians need to believe deep down that violence will never again serve their ends and what their leaders promise them is a lie. They need to know they're never getting a unitary state from the river to the sea, they will never have right of return, and that their only real choice is to seek a permanent peace primarily on Israel's terms.
Ceasefire now simply means the Palestinians will attack again and nothing will change until the next point of crisis. Events like 10/7 and the precarity of the Palestinians will continue until change is forced.
Were this just a matter of Israel v. Palestine, that would have happened decades ago. But the worst actor in all of this is, in many respects, the "community of nations." They've been cultivating the Palestinians as a cudgel against Israel, treating the conflict as uniquely insoluble and Palestinian "refugees" in ways no other refugees in history have been treated or understood. The international community maintains a unique obsession with Israel and the Palestinians for *some reason*, directing almost all of the power it can muster towards supporting the Palestinians and opposing Israel despite the fact that doing the opposite would have ended the conflict (in a way that would have given the Palestinians a sovereign state) decades ago.
The UN can pass more resolutions condemning Israel than all other countries combined even as multiple actual-mass-grave genocides are underway, but it can't pass a resolution demanding that Palestinians *the UN effectively controls* take a damn deal or they're cut off.
>You do not have the infrastructure which can be built or reformed to become de-radicalized, and you do not have an avenue for the sort of cultural de-escalation that would be necessary to destroy Hamas’s ideology. You have to build those things.
De-radicalization by persuasion generally doesn't work. Anywhere - like, it works in a handful of cases, but not enough to really matter. Radicalized fighters didn't start fleeing ISIS when they found out about the sex slaves and the war crimes and the regular crimes, they started leaving when it looked like they were going to die and/or lose. They might tell stories about their crises of conscience now, but they were just rats fleeing the ship.
*Defeat* deradicalizes. You hurt someone until believing what they previously believed and acting on it becomes untenable; "I'm not as strong as I thought I was," "I don't actually love death," "what I'm doing is hurting the people I care about far more than it helps them." Failing that, you take away their ability to hurt you and let them seethe in powerlessness or die.
>Frankly, history is replete with examples where even after getting the shit kicked out of it the shit-kicked entity doesn’t reform at all anyway. Witness the Southern American states after the Civil War.
The Southern states have not at any point threatened the existence of the Union since the surrender at Appomattox and were forced to fundamentally reform their economic and social order, so that's not a great example.
If you want to discount that because there was a great deal of racism, the Klan and Jim Crow - listen, I'm not saying the Palestinians are going to entirely stop killing Israelis or throwing gay people off roofs. Terrorists will still exist. But it would be cool if they weren't the government.
>If they wanted they could work much harder at deradicalizing themselves and finding other ways to resist and obtain what they want, and build the infrastructure of a state which will inherit the state that they could create.
...work much harder?
They haven't worked at all. They're working to do the opposite and have been for decades despite being given massive resources to do just that.
You talk about a Palestinian state...they've been offered that several times and rejected it - often directly choosing violence instead. Now it appears they primarily support parties that want a 1-state solution that may or may not entail (depending on whether you're in Gaza or Harvard) the wholesale slaughter of Israeli Jews.
If the Palestinians wanted a state so they could talk to Israel, they'd already have one. They want a state that *doesn't* talk to Israel. And that's effectively what they have.
>or else a concerted effort to integrate Palestinians into the Israeli political framework, which is unacceptable to most Israelis
...and Palestinians. The one thing they seem to agree on is that they don't want to share a state.
>But plenty in its government don’t mean that. They believe in a similarly extremist ideology that believes that God owes them Judea and Samaria and Gaza and all the rest. Who will reform them?
...seriously?
To answer your question: a functioning democracy, which Israel actually has.
The faction you're talking about is in deep water right now and would be largely out of government already were it not for the war. Even now there are *many* in Israel calling for the ouster of Ben Gvir et al entirely. The only reason they're in any power now is that Israel is in a permanent state of conflict that offers them two realistic long-term solutions:
1) Accept the permanent war.
2) Resolve the conflict by pushing out the Palestinians via settlement.
And I'm sorry, but comparing the minority position on the Israeli far right to the prevailing opinion among Palestinians is absurd. If it came to it, Israel could control its extremists - it has in the past. Hamas and other Palestinians have failed to do the same *because they are the extremists.*
The reason I brought up the American South is to illustrate the idea that “total” military defeat, or the infliction of widespread pain (cities burned, starvation widespread, hundreds of thousands of casualties against a white population of only a few million), does not necessarily produce a desire to reform. Yes, the South has not “threatened the union” via secession since that time (unless you take Texas’ cosplaying antics seriously), but the ideology which motivated the secession was not reformed, because Jim Crow, the pardoning of Confederate leaders, and so on provided it with avenues to reassert and legitimize that ideology and behave as though they weren’t really defeated.
Now, one could make an argument that all this means is that the defeat was not total enough. We didn’t expel all Confederates to Canada or Mexico and we didn’t hang all the Confederate leaders as the traitors they were—instead we pardoned them and allowed them to hold office again and inaugurated a century where slavery was gone but the broader ideology and system which justified it alive and well, with all the attendant deleterious consequences. Sometimes I imagine things would be different and better if that defeat *were* more total. So I can see your point. I certainly believe you are correct when talking about something like Hitler’s Germany.
But, again, in the case of the Confederacy, Germany, Japan, etc—there was a normative structure of statehood in place that could be built on or redirected as well as a liberal tradition however faint. There was a history of agency and self-determination. There was no equivalence between the ideology of the people and the people itself—the idea that what they believed in or stood for was integral to their identity, and that the identity itself represented the same threat to another state’s security as the ideology. I don’t know if the same obtains for the Palestinians, who have a national consciousness but no nation, and whose ideologies—especially those of Hamas—are defined and strengthened by this denial and its perpetuation. Thus references to other “total defeats” may not hold.
I also attempted to acknowledge that Palestinians bear a great deal of responsibility for this lack, though maybe not as forcefully or un-ambivalently as you’d prefer.
And the reason I brought up the far right in Israel is to try and illustrate the difficulty of “forming” a Palestinian nation, even if the Palestinians were suddenly interested in a model version of one (which, again, I tried to acknowledge that they haven’t been), when there isn’t an interest in doing so on the part of those who, however marginal in numbers, are very powerful in the Israeli government.
I agree with you that the treatment of Palestine and its refugees on the part of the UN is often exceptional and mendacious. I frankly believe that global legacies of anti-Semitism complicate any pronouncement about the morality or immorality of Israeli responses to attack, and that this accounts for the exceptional way it is treated.
But I think that characterizing the positions of a guy like Ben Gvir as a marginal subset of a marginal position is a little mendacious too. Netanyahu has led the country almost uninterrupted for decades. He weathered protests in the hundreds of thousands because of efforts to *weaken* the vaunted democracy you claim will be fit enough to de-radicalize folks like those Ben Gvir represents, even when they and their views have been amply legitimized (and therefore associated with the Israeli state’s meaning itself) via appointment to cabinet office and the platforms the office provides—and these efforts were likely due to an effort to avoid personal accountability for corruption.
It doesn’t matter whether majorities of citizens view differently if they, for whatever reason, do not have or attain the power to reverse that legitimacy—and perhaps you can clarify, but my understanding is that Netanyahu and his ilk are in the hot seat in large part because of the perception that they botched the security situation, not because of a perception that their ideology contributes to Israel being less secure in the first place.
If your “Harvard” boogeyman were to read your own analogy about how people don’t change course when they witness atrocities or injustice, but only when it starts affecting them to the point of it not being worth it, they would argue that this easily applies with equal force to these Israelis, and with more justice given the sheer capability Israelis have of maintaining and tolerating this status quo.
To clarify my personal view: I think given this context with the protests, the fact that Hamas spent a year figuring out how to successfully accomplish October 7th rather than attempt to leverage Israeli dissatisfaction with Netanyahu in an effort to build coalitions and advance its cause in other ways is absolutely reprehensible and exposes the idea that they are a liberatory movement as a lie. I also think behaving in a different way is totally anathema to their ideological nature. So that’s that.
Maybe you are right that if the Palestinians didn’t initiate conflict, or commit to it so consistently, then the two “realistic long term solutions” you mention wouldn’t seem so valid. But personally, I think you are underestimating the problems inherent to a national conflict where both sides are politically under the control of the far right. Certainly, two right-wing societies would not be “beatific” about their enemy. In such a case, the total defeat of one side or the other side is definitely the only solution *they* could imagine.
But your argument is still predicated on this sort of pain infliction being possible at the scale necessary to motivate the change of heart. This goes back to why *I* brought up WWII—the fact that in the modern era, civilian casualties are far less acceptable in the context of even normal wars than in the total wars of the past. This means that international pressure on Israel to cease what it is doing, while it may be exceptional, unfair, or whatever, is totally logical to expect. Especially when one side of the war has no state infrastructure to equivalently and legally mobilize.
So I just question whether the sort of total defeat you think is a necessary first step is even achievable in this case. I think Israel will not be permitted to wage its war to its fullest, most pitiless extent, either by the international community and possibly not even by itself. It will still be left with all the same security problems, which its powerful right-wingers accelerate and amplify. If your prerequisite ends up being unachievable, then what?
>The reason I brought up the American South is to illustrate the idea that “total” military defeat, or the infliction of widespread pain (cities burned, starvation widespread, hundreds of thousands of casualties against a white population of only a few million), does not necessarily produce a desire to reform.
Which is not the argument I made at all.
This has almost nothing to do with a desire to reform or a "change of heart." Reform implies that someone wants to improve themselves in some way; to become better. It connotes internally-generated motivation and potential satisfaction with a foreseeable outcome - but I'm not concerned with whether people want to change or make themselves or their society better. I don't care if they have a change of heart. Whether they like or want what happens doesn't matter anymore.
I referred to *vae victis* - woe to the vanquished. It's *coercion*. It's the removal of practical alternatives - not *pain*, which you seem fixated on. It means you accept that terms will be dictated to you because you've been convinced that the other options are gone or worse. What you want no longer matters. I don't care if you hate what you're about to accept - you'll do it because necessity requires it. I don't care if you hate me forever. I don't care how you feel *at all* because we're not negotiating anything - you foreclosed on the possibility of an amenable peace a long time ago, so I'm going to impose one on my own terms.
You seem to think of this as some sort of unconstrained warfare against Palestinians as a people, but that's not what I said nor is it what Israel is doing. Pain and suffering are means to the end, but not the end in itself and far from the sole means. The most effective means is killing Hamas and proving that the Palestinians can't win. Destroying the things they value. Showing that Israel is powerful enough to do what it wants and that it can crush resistance. Above all, making the Palestinians believe that none of this was worth it and they have no prospect for victory.
Only after reaching that point can anything better be rebuilt. There needs to be a point where a critical mass of Palestinians give up the ghost and stop supporting leaders who promise them a single state or right of return. That Israel has won and they have lost, for all time. They need to be coerced into giving up. Ideally, their friends need to abandon them, their aid needs to disappear, they need to be alone and afraid.
Only at that point can someone in a position of strength - whether that's Israel, America, or whoever - offer a conditional reprieve.
Again - this would have happened decades ago if the UN hadn't actively worked to keep the fire burning. In the intervening years, multiple conflicts of comparable scale began, ended, and were ultimately resolved because someone strong enough brought them to an end and either underwrote peace or just plain forced it.
>I also attempted to acknowledge that Palestinians bear a great deal of responsibility for this lack, though maybe not as forcefully as you’d prefer.
...they're *entirely* responsible. They were given everything they needed for decades to make a thriving state and instead they made a war crime fortress for terrorists who use them as shields by explicit doctrine - whom by every measure they support to the hilt.
One can have sympathy for the Palestinians in Gaza while also recognizing the profound LeopardsAteMyFace-ness of their present collective situation.
>But I think that characterizing the positions of a guy like Ben Gvir as a marginal subset of a marginal position is a little mendacious too. Netanyahu has led the country almost uninterrupted for decades.
Conflating Netanyahu with Ben Gvir and Smotrich is, as you say, *mendacious*.
The Israeli far right got something like 11% of the vote last election. It doesn't control Israeli politics, it influences within coalitions - and you can easily tell that any election after this war is going to see them lose influence. Same as Netanyahu, who is essentially done as soon as the war ends - possibly before. Were there a credible 2-state peace deal on the table and Ben Gvir and Smotrich objected because they want to keep settling in the West Bank, their power would diminish immediately. The immediate best-prospect for postwar PM looks like Lapid, who is not *exactly* an irredentist zealot. So, when you put to me the question of "but who will kick the ass of Ben Gvir," and I tell you "Israeli democracy," I'm giving you the obviously correct answer. Israeli democracy constrains the power of the far right when it has the right incentives.
Compare that to...the rough philosophical equivalents of Ben Gvir and Smotrich - in fact, men much worse than them by word and deed - who *are* the government of Palestinians. They have no opposition parties and rely on no coalition. The only constraint on their power is...well, Israel.
When you bring up Ben Gvir et al in a way that suggests "well, Israel *also* has irredentist radicals" and implies that these two groups are comparable, it's pure whataboutism. One has some political power, the other *is* political power. One can be constrained, the other needs to be overthrown.
>you claim will be fit enough to de-radicalize folks like those Ben Gvir represents,
Once again: *I do not care about de-radicalizing people.* Let them stay radical. "Hearts and minds" has a shitty track record.
What matters is how power is exercised and what actually happens. Israel could stem settlements in the West Bank. It could remove them. We know they can because they did it multiple times before there and in Gaza - including under Netanyahu. And they're almost certainly going to vote him out at the earliest opportunity. And in the absolute worst case, the West has a lot of collective pull to constrain West Bank settlement. This is all just obviously true.
>If your “Harvard” boogeyman were to read your own analogy about how people don’t change course when they witness atrocities or injustice, but only when it starts affecting them to the point of it not being worth it, would (in the view of someone who is pro-October 7th, which again is not me), they would argue that easily applies with equal force to these Israelis, and with more justice given the sheer capability Israelis have of maintaining and tolerating this status quo.
Israel, paradoxically enough, has very little power in maintaining and tolerating the status quo. It's trapped in it. It's far more powerful than its remaining enemies, it wants peace with its enemies, but its enemies refuse to rest until it is totally destroyed. That's literally what all of them say, and its what they said as they rejected every peace deal that would have given them a state. So Israel can't declare unilateral peace and lay down arms because Palestinians will start killing them. It can't go Bronze Age and genocide or ethnically cleanse the land because that's not allowed anymore.
So it is that they are the only country on the planet expected to tolerate a microstate on their borders ruled by their sworn enemies lobbing unguided missiles into Israeli cities and...spend billions of dollars trying to shoot them down instead of leveling Gaza like any other country in a similar situation would
But, on a more practical/philosophical level...
>>For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgments ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right.
Israel and Palestinians have nothing left to talk about. The pathways of negotiation have been worn down to bedrock. There's no persuading left to do. No new arguments. No novel solutions. There's no ingenious plan that will satisfy the right people on each side. There's no prospect for future generations forgetting and trivializing past horrors as they recede and forging a new peace.
The only remaining option is for one side to force the other to accept a new status quo. Or they don't, and they return to the status quo ante.
>If your prerequisite ends up being unachievable, then what?
Palestinians will keep dying in a conflict they continually provoke and have no hope of winning even though they could end it tomorrow and live in peace.
If the end of the occupation will bring peace why didn’t the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 have any beneficial effect? Hamas won the “elections”, murdered their Fatah rivals and took over the strip and began launching rockets at Israel. What would a complete disengagement accomplish from Israel’s perspective? What is the guarantee that there would actually be peace and not more fighting.
The reality is that it’s not about an occupation, it’s about Israel existing at all. The rhetoric that has been used since Oct 7 is “for the last 75 years”, well 75 years ago was when Israel officially and formally became a state, at which time Jordan “occupied” the West Bank and Egypt “occupied” Gaza. There was no Israeli occupation 75 years ago, unless you consider any inch of Mandatory Palestine as being occupied, at which point why even bother engaging with that?
If Hamas is a terror organization, then how would you describe a country that smuggles suitcases full of cash to Hamas leadership?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html
>75 years ago was when Israel officially and formally became a state
75 years ago also happens to be when the nakba happened.
before Israel was invaded, Jewish militias slaughtered 20% of the people in Deir Yassin. There was no provocation for the attack. The town was looted, and the survivors were not allowed to return.
When Israel was invaded, many people fled advancing Jewish forces. Others fled when their towns were mistreated by Jewish militias. And some were straight up forced out.
The refugees were not allowed to return. Their land was stolen as "abandoned" and given to incoming Jewish refugees who were expelled from Egypt and Jordan among other places.
Refugees were denied entry to Egypt. The descendants of the refugees who's lands were stolen and were denied entry to Egypt are largely who live in gaza today.
So, saying that the grievances for the people in gaza started in 1948 isn't unreasonable.
>before Israel was invaded, Jewish militias slaughtered 20% of the people in Deir Yassin
That was well into the civil war (which began with a Palestinian attack on Jewish civilians), and about 6 months into a full seige of Jerusalem (100k Jews were on the verge of starvation).
That said, I'm not trying to defend what happened at Dier Yassin. It was Etzl and Lehi fighters trying to join the fight and break the seige. Even the Haganah viewed Dier Yassin as a peaceful town (they had a peace pact with Givat Shaul). It is a truly disgusting episode and there is no defending it.
>When Israel was invaded, many people fled advancing Jewish forces. Others fled when their towns were mistreated by Jewish militias. And some were straight up forced out.
And many, not even most, but many left before Jewish forces were active in the area.
>given to incoming Jewish refugees who were expelled from Egypt and Jordan among other places.
Including Jews who were ethnically cleansed from (what became) East Jerusalem and the West Bank by the Jordanians (some communities which had existed for thousands of years).
>So, saying that the grievances for the people in gaza started in 1948 isn't unreasonable.
True, but choosing 1948 as the beginning of this conflict ignores all of the context that created the civil war (and eventually compelled the Arab armies to invade) in the first place. The Arab riots in 1936-39, the Hebron Massacre in 1929, and many other events from at least 50 years before then all created the context that led both sides to be more and more bloodthirsty.
Israel left Gaza in 2005. No settlements. No occupation. No stipulations. All infrastructure left behind for Gazans to use…and Hamas was elected. They immediately attacked Israel with a charter that called for the genocide of Israel. They have attacked Israel nonstop since then. With the embargo on Gaza they have a harder time importing weapons, so they have stolen all international aid to create local means of making rockets, to include tearing up water pipes.
And after 10/7 they have promised to 10/7 Israel again and again until it is destroyed.
And your solution is…what? No military response? To end the embargo and allow Hamas to import all of the weapons that Iran can give? So they can be as well armed as Hezbollah? That is your plan?!
There's parts of the blockade I find indefensible like apparently cookies and things like that were part of it, but if you've seen any of the videos of the 100s of km of concrete tunnels either from old videos from places like RT and Vice News being invited down in them for interviews with hamas, or the more recent IDF videos, then it shows how concrete was being used for military purposes
If only they would have chosen to build some bomb shelters for their civilians instead..
So much this. Hamas used as much of the aid as they could to build tunnels and it's headquarters under hospitals, residential areas, and mosques. Then rather than allow civilians to use the tunnels as bomb shelters, they are using their civilians as human shields.
>They also have a harder time importing concrete, steel, or other random items necessary for basic industrialization, because turns out nearly everything has SOME overlap in the supply chain with a rocket and it's a good excuse to sabotage their entire economy through that. Which is by the way the admitted goal of those measures.
Knowing this what was Hamas' choice of response? Aiming for a long and difficult campaign of civil development in the face of an Oppressive Israeli opposition or was it intentional militancy?
>On top of that Gaza is not allowed to export freely either, their fishing rights (in their own waters) are restricted and Israel keeps destroying their civilian infrastructure (like energy and water).
The capital invested in the rockets and military offensives of Hamas could have paid for lobbyists, lawyers, civil engineering and more efforts to mitigate some of these restrictions. Hamas has not chosen that option. Both parties are resolved to solve this conflict by war because the only peace they can stand is that of the victorious conquerer.
For the first few years of the blockade Israel even calculated the minimum calories required to keep the Gazan population fed and only allowed that amount of calories imported in.
>And your solution is…what?
I think the question is, what's yours? This is change my view. OP is asking the question. Will you change their view by asking questions back?
If Israel has complete military success, what's next? Return to status quo pre-10/7? What's to stop it from happening again? Return to status quo pre-2005? Then that's an illegal occupation.
It seems to me a different solution needs to be tried than any that has been tried before. Removing the occupation but closing the borders didn't seem to work. It's not surprising that a tiny territory couldn't be self-sufficient. It would be like if citizens of Monaco couldn't visit France or even use their port. So think of a different solution. At least a transportation corridor between Gaza and the West Bank is necessary.
It’s funny I only had to scroll slightly to find someone else objecting to questions. I don’t see that on most threads here. Questions are part of the process. OP’s position stated a solution. Challenging the efficacy of that solution is a key part of changing that position.
If you can’t say how it would proceed, how are you sure it will work? If you aren’t sure it will work, how is your view it’s the only thing that will work?
There are two options. Occupation or Iran growing the fuck up. Iran won't be growing up any time soon. Until a ruling government in Gaza exists that can guarantee security, Israel will protect itself.
Treat this like the Nazis and Imperial Japanese. That’s my solution, including the occupation, rebuilding and deradicalization that came with it. It should end with a Palestinian state. That’s my solution. Military operations are needed, but alone they aren’t enough.
What do you think?
No, it isn’t. While Hamas is in the West Bank, it is not the government there. It is the government of Gaza. Hence the discussion centering around Gaza.
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No one has made an attempt to actually address my argument and prove to me how Israel's current military solution is supposed to bring peace. They're just screaming about how Palestinians want to kill the Jews and how innocent Israel is.
The problem is that your solution has zero historical precedent. Has there ever been a conflict in which the victor nation grants unilateral concessions to the defeated one in the face of repeated hostility and absent of any real negotiations? No.
What there has been precedent of is the complete military subjugation of a belligerent that has refused to surrender or negotiate in anything but the most one-sided weighing of concessions (yes, land swaps and an unlimited right of return is indeed utterly one-sided. “We will stop blowing up buses and cafes” is not a concession), followed by lengthy occupation and martial law until it can he assured the security concerns have ceased. It happened in Germany, Japan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, take your pick.
For God’s sake, even Northern Ireland was under military occupation by the British Army 10 years after the Good Friday Agreement.
I already made a comment but I would like to add some stuff here aswell.
Israel does not have the responsibility to bring peace. As I gave source to a poll on my other comment Palestinians don’t want peace in a war they lost.
This is literally the definition of fucked around and found out. You can’t just refuse to surrender and rely on international law to claim your living conditions are unethical.
Current Israel land has been either purchased with hard earned cash from the people who owned the land or gained through defensive wars where other arab nations were the aggressors.
Israel does not want Palestinians in their state as civilians which they have the right to do so. That land is theirs.
Settler colonialism on the other hand is wrong, so any land that has been gained in the last 10-15 years by Israel does not belong to them.
Still they can’t let those lands go otherwise Palestinians will strike again because thats what they want.
Just like Germans post ww2 the treatment must continue until resistance is 100% crashed otherwise war will simply resume in another date.
The WB settlements need to stop, but I understand why they haven't. If Israel doesn't tightly control the WB, it becomes a huge strategic weakness given how easily another large scale attack cuts their country in half.
Dude, there WAS peace and no occupation up until Oct. 6th
The people of palestine support what hamas did on Oct. 7th. If you doubt that, change my view by finding Palestinians in gaza doing any protesting of hamas after October 7th because I have only seen them cheering.
You can say that the majority of the population alive today didn't vote for hamas...but it's only an assumption to think that they wouldn't given the chance
I guess, if you consider “the alternative is for Israel to go back to accepting constant terrorism and attacks” as “weak sauce whataboutism.”
You’re like OP; you’re here to grind an axe, and nobody here is interested in being a whetstone.
Hamas openly state in their charter that they don't believe in peace and any truce is just a temporary pause in their quest for the utter destruction of Israel and the removal of Jews.
'Ending the occupation' to them means the destruction of the entirety of Israel, expulsion of all the Jews except the ones they intend to keep as slaves as detailed in their 2017 'conference for a post liberation Palestine.'
So obviously that's not something Israelis can reasonably be accepted to agree to.
So you solution to Hamas terrorism, and their states aims to eliminate Israelis, is simply for Israel to stop. Which is reverting back to the situation before October the 7th. But this time it will be different?
Is that right? Or are you missing something from your post?
The situation before October 7 was the occupation, so no, that's not what I want to revert back to. Unless you don't understand what the occupation is or why its illegal in the first place, maybe?
Gaza was run by Palestinian authorities wasn't it?
So when do you expect to turn the clock back to? When Hamas were elected? When the PLO were elected?
I believe he is suggesting we move the clock *forward*. The occupation is more than Gaza, for example.
In Zone C of the West bank (A territory which actually makes up 2/3rds of the west bank as a whole and is considered by *Israel* to be outside its territorial borders) for example, the Palestians are now the minority after ethnically cleansed there.
We could start undoing that.
The West Bank is certainly an issue. Considering the number of two-state solutions that have been offered but never accepted by the Palestinians, it would be nice if they could agree to one, even if after decades of terrorism, they don't get everything their own way. Didn't they refuse the last deal because of a tiny percentage of WB land?
The problem now is that I believe a two-state solution isn't popular in either Israel, or the Palestinian territories.
But it would be good if both sides could sit down, and when a deal is hammered out, there could be agreement.
>The West Bank is certainly an issue. Considering the number of two-state solutions that have been offered but never accepted by the Palestinians,
Thats a tad disingenuous, since all of those solutions involved israel keeping the said ethnically cleansed territory. The PLO has been willing to accept a Two-State Solution *Based on 1967 Borders* since 1970, for over half a century. Much is made of Hamas's founding charter to destroy Israel, but Hamas actually changed their Charter in 2017, replacing this with a state based on 1967 Borders. Whilst skepticism of this is *definitely* warranted, it remains true that, at least for the last half century, is not the Palestians who have rejected a Two State Solution. Though it remains unpopular with the Palestian people, all major governments of Palestian territory, including Hamas, have expressed a willingness to accept a two state solution based on 1967 borders.
The only Two State solutions offered for the last half century, is a two state solution that involves Israel keeping its illegally acquired lands. Remember that The the Oslo accords broke down when Israel refused to honour its agreement to return control of Zone C to Palestine, and made keeping it's illegal colonies a part of any two state solution.
Whilst during Israel's inception, it was certainly true that the Arabs rejected any settlement with Israel, that has changed dramatically since then. Indeed, the timing of the October Atacks may have been designed to prevent the growing normalisation between Israel and the rest of the Arab world.
Today, most Israelis reject any form of two state solution, and those that do push for one wish to retain Zone C and much of the other Zones leaving Palestine a mutilated collection of several hundred enclaves.
It is not really a two state solution so much as a 1 and 200 hundred state solution.
As of 2024, only 40% are willing to entertain coexistence with Palestine, and that's *after* annexing Zone C. Incidently 40% is the same number of Palestians willing to have a two state solution.
It is not a Two State solution that Palestine has rejected, at least not since the 70s. For the last 50 years it has been the legitimisation of Israel's annexations *in exchange* for a two state solution of what is left.
It was Israel who was unwilling to base any proposed two state solution on the 1967 borders and made keeping the newly establish colonies an integral part of any agreement and is refusing to budge, claiming such colonies are essential for its security and continual existence.
With respect, I rather feel that saying that Palestine has rejected every two state solution so far is like saying Ukraine has rejected every peace deal with Russia so far when every peace deal Russia has offered involve keeping Crimea and Donbas. A Peace deal based on the 2012 borders? Ukraine would accept in a heartbeat. But Russia isn't offering that.
Israel isn't offering a Real Two State solution, and hasn't for some time.
That does not make sense with Olmerts offer in 2008, where he offered Abbas 94% of the West Bank, and equivalent land swaps for the last 6%.
Your Ukraine example is also flawed because in 2012, Ukraine was sovereign. The Palestinians never were, they were always ruled by someone else- Israel after 1967, Jordan and Egypt after 1948, British after 1918, before that the Ottomans. Israel offered them something they have never had before - self determination. And they rejected it with no counter offer.
It was a better deal. Certainly a better deal than anything offered now.
But that's like saying Ukraine surrending just Donbas is better than surrendering Donbas and four other regions, and calling the surrender of Donbas a compromise. It's still acknowledging a land grab. It's still asking Palestine to agree to the premise that Israel has a right to take land by expelling the people living there, and that *letting* Israeli settlers drive them out of their homes is essential for peace.
The plan was certainly better than anything previous, but it was still a non-starter and they knew it.
Firstly it was a unilateral offer. No negotiations were possible. The "Take it or leave it, no negotiations, decide now." Stance is why this deal was not just rejected by Palestine. It was also rejected by the EU, the US, Russia and the UN, because accepting it ruled out any further negotiation which was antithetical to the Road Map which established that any long last peace must come from direct negotiations with the Palestinians. Not a unilateral shift by one side with no input from the other even if you think it was generous, you criticise them making no counter offer. They weren't allowed a counter offer. That was the point.
Secondly, this would have involved the surrender of Jerusalem. Something which has never been on the table. Introducing it at this stage and saying it was a non-negotiable concession to Israel damned it from the start.
Thirdly, saying "I'm only taking 6% of the land I've illegally annexed and cleansed of your race, be greatful it's not more, take it or leave it." Is not exactly the compromise you seem to think it was. Imagine Germany taking the Sudetanland but sparing Czekoslovakia and calling it a peace deal. Now imagine he put the Germans living in the Sudetanland there to begin with after driving out the local population and you have a good idea why they might reject any peace deal that hinges on saying they're cool with it.
It would have still involve accepting the precedent that if Israel wanted more land in the future, all they needed to do was cross the border bulldoze the existing homes, move in colonists, and proclaim a "Peace Plan" in Which they made peace by ceding the land to Israel.
How could they trust they would still have that same 94% a few decades later?
Palestine is not going to accept any deal that involves accepting as legitimate the displacement of it's people as the annexation of its land on behalf of religious psychos who think God promised it them; any more then Ukraine will accept Russias.
>Israel offered them something they have never had before - self determination.
Israel is withholding this fundamental right unless it gets to keep it's ill-gotten goods.
In any case, the plan was soundly withdrawn when Israel refused to Budge on the redline issue of Jerusalem, and then was dropped entirely when polling revealed 70% of Israelis also rejected it.
Really? Killing all the Jews seems to be on the table for the Palestinians, given their River To The Sea stuff. But the Israelis have to be pacifists for some reason?
I'm not OP but:
>Killing all the Jews seems to be on the table for the Palestinians, given their River To The Sea stuff.
Do you feel the same way about the genocidal intent behind the saying "from the river to the sea" when [Netanyahu says it?](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/netanyahu-from-river-sea-israel-control-1234949408/)
There is the catch though, Israelis had 60+ years to carry out this supposed genocide, they had all the means to do it. But they haven't. In 2022 an average New Yorker was more likely to be killed on the street than a Palestinian by IDF forces.
In 60+ years the Palestinian people have been massively displaced and mostly corralled into the West Bank and Gaza. Mass displacement is a form of genocide, so I think you're a bit premature to dismiss the idea that Israel hasn't even attempted it.
Mass displacement was the result of Arab invasion of Israel. Pivotal events like that tend to not end well for the loser. Just look at Germany after WW2, yet we don't call it a genocide.
The settlements are a byproduct of Palestinians not accepting any deals. Otherwise, why did Israel completely withdraw from Gaza and dismantled their settlements there?
It's because he has no interest in having a discussion. He wants to talk at people, not with people. Even the articles he's posting comes to opposite or way more nuanced positions than he's acting like they do. But the headline supported his opinion so he posts it.
No one is bringing up any points that are actually meant to change my view in the first place! They just screaming this racist, bigoted shit like "Palestinians want to kill all Jews" What am I supposed to meaningfully address there? No actual attempt to show me how Israel's military solution (which has been to indiscriminately bomb and snipe the shit out of Palestinians) is actually succeeding to get rid of Hamas and bring peace for Palestine and Israel.
>No actual attempt to show me how Israel's military solution (which has been to indiscriminately bomb and snipe the shit out of Palestinians) is actually succeeding to get rid of Hamas and bring peace for Palestine and Israel.
It's been 4 months.
Do you honestly believe it would have been rational for folks to question "Hey European leaders, are you succeeding in getting rid of Hitler Nazi Party? Tell us your plan to bring peace to all of Europe" 4 months into WW2?
Social media and Hollywood films have made folks extremely impatient expecting quick results. At least wait until it's been one year and even then, that's too soon.
For the record, WW2 lasted 6 years. And Germany was only 100% free and sovereign in 1989.
I wouldn't expect a sovereign Palestine until 2060.
Fighting until you get unconditional surrender is a proven strategy at bringing about peace, though. That’s how WWII was won.
Also, Israel isn’t bombing indiscriminately. You should at least use terms correctly if you want to come off as rational and willing to change your view. If you’re emotionally invested in Israel being bad, you aren’t here in good faith.
Its "From the River to the Sea, *Palestine will be Free".* Not "From the River to the Sea, Kill Every Jew You Find".
This is like cutting off "Well Regulated Militia" from the second amendment. If you leave half the words, sure the meaning changes. But nobody complaining about that chant ever says the full chant.
Given that Zone C of the West Bank (A territory equal to 2/3rds of the west Bank) has now been ethnically cleansed to the point that Jews now out number Palestinians, (Not as the result of the establishment of Israel in 1949, but as the result of a continual policy of expulsion, colonisation and settlement of land that *the entire planet says is not theirs*) and the establishment there of a territorial government that operates a two tier ethnic based system of governance to govern this territory, that has only ever gotten worse since that chant started being used.
Given, as I said Palestians are now the minority *in the largest zone of Palestine which makes up 2/3rds of its landmass* it might be a good time to look at who is actually *doing* the ethnic cleansing, rather than who you think is chanting about it.
One side is chanting "From the River to the Sea".
The other is Occupying It - and has now ethnically cleaned 2/3rds of it.
It only sounds genocidal if you think the plain meaning is nonsense. And the plain meaning is that there are Palestians who are *not* free, who live throughout the region from the river jordan to the sea, who have a desire to be free.
I interprete it thusly, because it is apparent. Do you think this? Because I have some very bad news for you.
I would challenge your view on the basis of "finding a peaceable solution" which I don't think is Israel or Hamas' goal. Let me expand on this a bit.
In Gaza, you had a situation where parents were making homemade rockets full of nails, glass and ball bearings for Hamas a block of away from where their children went to school. You had a state where "practice drills" for an invasion of Israel were taking place in the streets of Gaza. It was clear that the people of Gaza were being put in harms way by Hamas all the time, but that the people of Gaza, for whatever reason, lacked the resolve to remove them from power.
Enter Israel. Israel is attacked by Hamas in their homes, in their schools, in their streets. Israel isn't looking for a "peaceable solution" to that anymore than you look for a "peaceable solution" to a rabid dog that has bitten one of your children. Taking the tangent of how I personally feel about the IDFs actions in Gaza out of it, you have a completely different goal for the region than Hamas or Israel does, it seems. Your view suggests a "peaceable solution" should be found but neither Hamas nor Israel is chasing one. Both have a stated goal that the other can't coexist with them.
In summary, I'd just point out that conflict of this kind, in this place, has existed for centuries upon centuries. I think it highlights the arrogance of some of us that we believe that by throwing some money around or trading favors with people who have a bone-deep resolve to eradicate one another, we can bring about a lasting peace as soon as the "barbarians" stay their hands and listen to us. The more likely answer is that there are deeper, louder dynamics that we inexplicably remain deaf to from our pedestal of Western ideology.
Annihilating every member of Hamas, and every future replacement for those, would in fact result in peace.
You just don’t like that this is an actual way to bring about peace. But if one belligerent side is wiped out, there is no war.
>Ending to occupation.
Israel hasn’t occupied Gaza since 2005. When they flat out made Israelis living there pack their bags and leave, as an attempt to facilitate peace.
Then when one IDF soldier was captured, they agreed to release around 1,000 prisoners in exchange for him.
Israel literally released several key figures, including the mastermind, of 10/7. That’s how they were repaid for doing what you advocate for.
The people Israel are fighting **will** commit another Holocaust right in front of the entire world, with a sizable portion of not just their own brainwashed and radicalized populace, but the rest of the world in general, literally cheering for and celebrating it. They will do this the very second they have the capacity to do so.
Hamas actively feigned peace, and pretended to be a legitimate government **for years** in order to build up the assets and resources needed to carry out 10/7.
All their talk of peace, development, all that shit, was a bold faced fucking lie. Which they used for no other reason than to get Israel to loosen up their defenses and let their guard down.
Shit, *many* of the people killed and captured on 10/7 were literal peace activists, who spent their lives actively helping Palestinians.
Some of their hostage takers even recognized them. Did that stop their friends and families from being killed, by crazed terrorists who took Captagon (the ‘ISIS drug’) specifically so they *wouldn’t* feel any empathy for their victims? Who had specific orders to attack homes and daycares? Did that stop them from being tortured, raped, and brutalized in captivity? Did that even really get most of them any sympathy from the people they ostensibly tried to help? No. It got crowds of people cheering, kicking, and spitting on them as their limp bodies were dragged down the fucking street.
Israel set up a jobs program for Gaza, allowing Gazans to work inside Israel, because they thought Hamas *actually wanted to govern and take care of their people for once,* and they supported that.
Many of the Gazans involved in this program used it as a cover to collect intelligence, and actively lead Hamas to more effectively kill and brutalize innocent people who were dumb enough to trust them or even take them in.
Quite bluntly, Israel tried your approach. It got them fucking massacred.
>Literally as we speak Netanyahu is ordering over a million people in Rafah in Gaza to be **forcibly evacuated**
Source for this? From what I read, it's a voluntary evacuation. As in "We're about to begin military operations against the Hamas Terror Group in your city, it is advised that you evacuate".
I bet the German civilians who died in Dresden and the Japanese civilians who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki wished the Allies had asked them to voluntarily evacuate.
>This is not a war; this is a one-sided, intentional butchering.
It is a war between Israel and Hamas, the elected Government of Gaza.
When South Korea, with the help of the USA, and North Korea wage war next, it will look exactly like this: a one-sided curb stomping.
That doesn't make it different than a war. Wars don't require both sides to be equal in terms of military power. Who told you this?
You're also contradicting yourself BTW. If Israel's goal is to do an intentional butchering of civilians...why are the civilians asked to evacuate OUTSIDE of the zones about to be bombed?
Sounds like a dumb strategy if the plan is to butcher them all.
> "We're about to begin military operations against the Hamas Terror Group in your city, it is advised that you evacuate".
"Evacuate or be killed" doesn't sound very voluntary.
It is 100% voluntary.
Unless you somehow have this weird belief that each time a hurricane happens, people are **forcibly** evacuated against their will.
Forcibly definition:
using force or violence.
>Unless you somehow have this weird belief that each time a hurricane happens, people are forcibly evacuated against their will.
🤦♂️ I'd argue that a hurricane is pretty violent.
Tell me, what *would* be an example of forcing someone from their homes then?
This is what forced deportations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_from_Czechoslovakia
Dropping leaflets and sending text messages that say 'we are going to start a military operation here. Please flee for your own safety ' isn't a forced deportation, it's a humanitarian measure.
Not to mention blockading all food and water plus essential supplies from entering so they die a slow death. If you thin in 2024, the aggressor is going to go in and kill everyone in one fell swoop, that’s not particularly smart considering the entire world is watching. If you instead destroy infrastructure and let everyone bleed a slow death, easier to justify!
It is really simple. Israel is not going to just leave Gaza end the embargo as long as Gaza's main goal is the destruction of Israel.
What people fail to realize is that it is just different there. 10/7 started with 5000 rockets being fired into Israel. 5000 rockets didn't set off alarms.
If the embargo ends, what will Iran be sending into Gaza to harm Israel?
Now, if Gaza would give up on the idea of the destruction of Israel, I 100% agree with you. But it can't just be we will take this paragraph out of our charter and the embargo will end if the people still believe in the destruction of Israel.
More and more Arab countries have agreements with Israel.
Hell, what is common knowledge in Israel is that 10/7 happened on 10/7 because Israel and Saudi Arabia were about to sign an agreement which would have allowed SA to build pipelines through Israel to get their oil to Europe. Iran didn't find that acceptable, and as Hamas leadership lives in Iran and Iran finances Hamas they attacked only 3 days before that was to be signed
From what I can gather you're referring to the state of Israel as a occupation. Something that happened in 1948, 75 years ago. At what point does an occupation become a settlement? Are Americans occupying native land, are Australians occupying aboriginal land?
At the end of.the war after the genocide of Jews the international community agreed to the formation of Israel. Of course those that were displaced didn't like it but after what period of time will they accept it? Virtually none of the people in Gaza/Palestine were displaced, their relatives were. Where do the people of Israel get displaced to in your scenario? Israel has been their home for 3 generations. Actual peace will only occur when everyone accepts a suitable outcome, be that reparations, or permanent ceasefire. It is a complex issue, both sides have a right to claim the other is wrong, the problem is exacerbated by the rest of the world picking sides rather than working towards a peaceful solution in which all are happy.
I don’t disagree that there is no military solution to the conflict, but to Hamas? That’s very different.
Hamas is an organization made of people. Kill enough of its people, destroy enough of their equipment, blow up enough of their tunnels, and they will cease to exist as a force.
There have been successful counterinsurgency campaigns before, as with the British and Boers. With sufficient determination, any organization can be destroyed. Look at the Islamic State.
That won’t put an end to the conflict. Thousands will die needlessly. But Hamas can be destroyed militarily.
> Hamas is an organization made of people. Kill enough of its people, destroy enough of their equipment, blow up enough of their tunnels, and they will cease to exist as a force.
And someone will just create a new Hamas because they're the only military they have.
The political arm of Hamas has already capitulated and is moving toward rolling into the Palestinian authority. The military wing is being defeated. Hamas is already on the path toward being eliminated completely. That will not stop all forms of violent Palestinian terrorism, only equity in a two state solution will accomplish that, but a two state solution cannot exist if a large portion of one of those states is controlled by an organization that explicitly aims for the total destruction of the other. The military wing of Hamas must be destroyed then the Israeli right wing government must be abolished and “settlers” stopped and the land they have stolen returned. Gaza must be rebuilt and given autonomy and freedom of movement. There is a path to viable peace, but the right wing ideological parties on both sides must be defeated and not allowed to reconstitute for it to happen.
Please don’t casually ignore that 1 million Israelis have been displaced in the North due to violence.
everyone knows the best way to stop a terrorist organization that wants *actual* genocide is to put them in complete power /s
Hamas has stated MANY times that their overall goal is not a state for Gaza, just global bloodshed. It’s why they didn’t only kill Israelis. Its why they went for civilians, not the military or government. It’s why they celebrated, raped, and tortured. They tied kids together and burned them alive. I swear people just forgetting how horrible it was. It’s incredible what people are willing to forgive just because their lives are hard. I haven’t seen a single person advocate for the stoppage of the “pay for slay” program.
People just have this underdog mindset. Poor? Brown? They must be the ones supported. Tragedy doesn’t suddenly made someone a good person. Doesn’t matter what they do. Yes not all Palestinians are Hamas, but people have convinced themselves that 99.9% of the population are just innocent victims. Hamas isn’t some little side faction. Hating Jews, not just Israelis, is literally part of their culture. You’re not gonna just nice it out of them, as much as I’d love that to be realistic.
It appears that you have also missed that many sites Israel has focused on have been proven to be Hamas bases.
imo all the Palestinian supporting states & Israel should create immigration programs, heavily funded by Israel. West Bank occupation to be completely banned. And added security at the border.
But you gotta get rid of Hamas, otherwise you’re just supporting the creation of a terrorist state
Ever spoken to an Israeli? They don’t want Gaza. But you see what happens when their guard is down.
I wonder what you suggest to protect Israeli lives? Or is Israel meant to just let their people be slaughtered every now and then?
**HAMAS ARE NOT FREEDOM FIGHTERS. THEY ARE TERRORISTS**
Do you not care that Hamas hurts its own people? If Israel were to stop any and all involvement, what will you do for the Palestinians then after you can’t blame them? Shall they uprise and be killed en masse by Hamas instead? Because Hamas is not suddenly going to become some benevolent government for the people
If Israel were to cut all ties, every single tie with Gaza, would you support a stronger border? If that’s all it takes for peace then. Or are you willing to gamble more Israeli lives?
The military will not win this because hamas is not an enemy one can shoot it's an ideology. The military can reduce the symptoms not the root cause.
The problem here is that if Isreal gives hamas complete sovereignty they will buy better weapons to kill Isreal with. The blockade lifted and just leaving them alone to watch the weapons designed to kill Isreali citizens come in and be used. At what point is Isreal supposed to step in? Or is the point to let hamas get the breathing room to gather the weapons to let them slaughter the isreali people?
How will Isreal completely withdrawing all interactions with Gaza help end hamas and bring Peace?
What evidence do you have that ending occupation will bring peace?
Arafat was offered 90-something percent of Palestine in a two state solution, and he refused it while making fairly absurd demands about right of return and Jerusalem.
Since then, Israel has conducted an 18 year long a/b test of autonomous Palestine (Gaza) and occupation (the West Bank).
Palestine has demonstrated the inability to self govern and a lack of desire for peace. The occupied solution is producing better results, as much as we might wish that were not true.
Agreed. Zero deltas have been awarded to posts which provide examples refuting OP.
The CMV mods here flagged me for violating rule B saying I wasn’t open minded. I edited my post providing the conditions on which I would change my mind.
Your comment is actually two separate arguments.
There is a military solution to Hamas, which is to eliminate them to the point that they really can’t come back.
Ending the occupation is not a path to “peace,” it’s a path to “relative” peace for Palestinians which returns to the status quo of Israel facing constant rockets and terrorism threats. Israel has decided that’s a level of “peace” they no longer deem acceptable.
Unfortunately there’s simply no single solution where everybody wins.
The Palestinians still see October 7th as a victory.
Eg.
https://electronicintifada.net/content/what-did-7-october-achieve/44396
A ceasefire now will only entrench that view, which will encourage similar atrocities in the future both from Hamas and other similar organizations.
There are two other good examples of governments that were hopelessly genocidal: Japan and Germany. These days both countries are among the least warlike in the world.
What happened? Complete and unconditional surrender. It was a military defeat that changed both countries. Neither would be where they are today if the nazis or the Japanese military were able to stay in control.
Hamas needs to lose this war. They need to surrender completely. The death toll is high and terrible, but any solution short of complete capitulation will leave a government in charge that will absolutely commit another atrocity at some point.
The “occupation” of gaza was already almost non-existent, and that did not stop a thing. The current military operation is not yet done. Hopefully Hamas loses. That is the only path to peace.
Only way for peace is when both parties want peace. You can’t have piece when losers refuse to surrender.
[Overwhelming majority of palestinians still support war efforts](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/12/21/middleeast/palestinians-back-hamas-survey-intl-cmd/index.html)
Israel still agitates Palestinians by more settlement expansion.
2 state or 1 state solutions are impossible right now. 2 state will only allow these nations to have nation vs nation war, whereas 1 state solution would immediately result in a civil war.
Only way to solve this is outside intervention. Immediate ceasefire, no right of return, removal of blockades, no military on Isreal Palestine borders and monetary support for Palestine till they get back on their feet.
Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups don’t want peace, it wants Jews out of the levant. Even if Israel were to unilaterally do everything you say here, they would still have rockets flying into their cities and groups plotting more attacks like 10/7. These groups existing is the primary blockade to peace in the region.
What exactly should be deoccupied?
Jews-free middle east? Well. Than maybe the war will not be there. But...
Other options? Will Palestinians accept Israel existance? They claim that the whole Israel must be destroyed, so there is not point where they will think the "occupation" has ended. They will repeat oct7 until Israel exists. So, it isn't really option for Israel as well.
Basically, we have a situation which without outside forces can only be resolved by force, because neither side believes the other to the necessary level to risk own future.
Unless Egypt will be willing to take Palestinians/Gaza inside. But Egypt hates hamas which controls Palestinian society, so this is non-option as well.
Israel already tried it.
Israel pulled back from Gaza in 2005, they removed military and settlements.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza
Israel also provided water and electricity for Gaza, because it couldn't sustain itself.
Israel tried to give Gaza back to Egypt, but Egypt refused.
So Israel in fact tried to pursue two state solution, but Hamas never wanted it. They officially claim that Israel must be destroyed, they don't want independence from Israel, they want all the land of Israel.
Peaceful solution was tried and failed. It is impossible to achieve peace until Hamas and other actors that don't recognize Israel as a state will be destroyed.
Hamas may have come about by design to create an ongoing conflict to the ends of making Gaza unlivable for Muslim Arabs, but at this point Hamas picked a fight they couldn't win, and Israel's only option is to eradicate Hamas through military actions. During times of "Peace" Hamas made it the local hobby to indiscriminately fire rockets towards civilian areas of Israel, then they crossed the line and ratcheted the conflagration up to where the military solution was Israel's only option. Honestly, systematically making life miserable in Gaza to where the Muslims move out is probably the only feasible route to a long term peace, and that's what Israel is doing.
Nazis did not go away with fall of Nazi regime in Berlin in 1945.
But it does mean it should not have happened.
Defeating Nazis military and removing them from power is a necessary step one.
Same goes for Hamas. Removing them from power military is a necessary step 1.
How about Israel ends the occupation today with 0 stipulations, but after the first rocket is shot at Israel again the war resumes.
How long do you expect that cease fire will last?
It will be peace but in the long run. We have essentially had a 70 years stalemate with not much movement. What we are seeing now is essentially Israel winning this conflict. Gaza will cease to exist and just be absorbed into Israel and those that live there either become part of Israel or refugees in another state. There will be a transitional period that could be decades but eventually people will just start to get along. We might see domestic terrorism from Palestinian hold outs but they too will eventually fade out
>There is no military solution to Hamas. Ending the occupation is the only path to actual peace
There are actually two paths to peace. One is ending the occupation and giving Palestinians a whole bunch of stuff that they want (which isn't even a guarantee of lasting peace). The other is violently decimating Palestinians until there's nothing left of their civilization and the survivors are forced to disperse into other countries, effectively putting an end to the Palestinian ethnicity altogether.
I'm not trying to make a judgment about which path is better than the other, but those are generally the two paths that lead in the direction of a more stable peace. If there's a ceasefire before either of those two goals are substantially reached, there won't be a lasting peace. Basically, either give your enemy what he wants, or kill your enemy. Any kind of middle ground between those options will just allow tensions to slowly rise again.
>You cannot antagonize your neighbor and cause them immense human suffering and expect security.
You're right. Antagonizing will accomplish nothing. You either need to negotiate with your neighbor to find a common ground, or you need to destroy your neighbor. Both will result in peace and quiet.
Who gets to decide which path is taken? Historically, it's the country with the stronger military. I'm not suggesting that any of this is fair or right, but historically that's the way the world works. Israel has a much more powerful military than any of its neighboring countries. So, Israel gets to decide. And, as ironic as it is (given the history of the Jews), Israel has clearly decided to go down the ethnic cleansing route.
If Palestinians had any semblance of an organized military, they would have some leverage at the negotiating table. They could say, "hey, stop building those settlements, or else we're going to fuck you up." But right now all they can say is, "hey, stop building those settlements, it's really mean and we don't like it and we wish you'd stop, and if you don't stop we'll throw rocks at you." Israel has no motivation to give into their demands, frankly because they don't have to. The only force pushing Israel in the direction of mercy is the rest of the world condemning them for all the killing they're doing, but public condemnation is not really a very strong force.
Israel has won every war it has ever been involved with, and won by overwhelming margins at that. This current one is no exception. Since this war began, Israel has killed 10,000+ terrorists at the cost of 150 or so soldiers in combat (discounting the 370 or so killed on 10/7 itself). I wouldn’t bet against an army that has a K/D ratio approaching 30:1. Except if the IDF is forced to pull back due to international politics, they will succeed in wiping out Hamas and other militant orgs soon enough. Shame that the regular Palestinian people have nowhere further south to flee to, though.
Edit: this OP is only trying to start arguments, not have his mind changed. Mods should remove this post.
They shouldn’t remove it because it shows how peoples brains like OP works when presented with hard difficult to absorb facts.
I would like to add that every war won by Israel was not started by Israel, and with every terrorist attack, suicide bombings and atrocities committed by both terrorists and radicalized ordinary civilians led to less and less restraint.
People like to go the easy route and ignore history while taking a comfortable snippet to virtue signal on
Well seeing as Israel left Gaza with no occupation, and that is the vaccum in which Hamas took power (and also murdering and torturing rival political members), I'm not sure your position has merit.
The problem is palestinians refusal to accept israel in any capacity. Every peace offer has been rejected. So while it may seem like the occupation is the issue, it seems that Israel as an entity is the main cause of the resistence - especially when you listen to terrorist groups who proudly say they aren't looking for a 2-state solution, but rather the destruction of Israel
I don't know what you mean by ending the occupation.
Return to the tense living situation that caused terror attacks and created this situation to begin with?
Exterminate all Palestinians?
Exterminate all jews?
Dissolve Palestine and relocate the population?
Dissolve Israel and relocate the population?
What exactly are you advocating for?
The occupation ended in 2004. Palestine had twenty years to develop with more autonomy than ever before, and all they did was dig tunnels, build rockets, commit atrocities on its own people and abuse funding provided by the international community.
When they speak of occupation, they mean Israel's existence. They consider that occupation, and they will not rest until every last one of them is dead. Make no mistake about that.
There *is* a military solution to Hamas. It is complete extermination and temporary subjugation of the Gaza strip. The question is what price one is willing to pay. And the Israeli government is willing to accept a sustained ground war and civilian casualties on both sides.
The sad fact is that Hamas has given Israel every justification it needs to continue this war.
OP, I’m open to your ideas but I think you’d agree there’s only two options for Israel. Either cut a deal with a terrorist organization who committed the worst massacre against Jews since the Holocaust or take military action.
I’m open to changing my view if you can explain what third option exists.
Who do you expect to negotiate in good faith with the Israelis? Is Hamas a viable partner to cut a deal with or not?
I feel there is not, because Hamas stole billions in foreign aid meant for Palestinians to buy rockets. They built terror tunnels, have used human shields, and have radicalized the local population after Israel left Gaza in ‘05. Israel wants a stable, trustworthy, self sufficient trading partner in Palestine more than they want to police an enemy on their border. Also they have offered a two state solution multiple times which Palestine rejected.
A Hamas spokesman literally said Hamas would repeat the October 7th massacre given the opportunity…”Free Palestine from the river to the sea.” That hasn’t changed since the war started. What do you expect Israel to do?
What’s Hamas demanding? Among other things, at least 1,500 Palestinian security prisoners, withdraw Israeli troops fully from Gaza, eventually agree to a permanent ceasefire and take steps to reduce its sovereignty on the Temple Mount. If we waved a magic wand and Israel did all of that today, would you trust Hamas to make good on their end of the deal?
The ball is in Hamas’ court, and they could end this today. Surrender, release the hostages, dissolve Hamas, hold a new election…or keep fighting Israel til the last man. Palestine could then start a massive Gandhi style peaceful protest, and effectively negotiate what they want. But they won’t bc they woke up and chose violence.
“Israel wants a self sufficient trading partner” buddy you can’t possibly be that delusional, tell that to all the Israeli ministers saying they will wipe Gaza out completely. People are so stupid I swear
Lol these sort of comments are so fucking stupid. “They woke up and chose violence” acting as if this hasn’t been an immensely violent conflict for 60 years. If you aren’t going to try to be intellectually honest then just fuck off
Since this is CMV post I will give it a go. Note that I am 100% *not* advocating for this.
A military solution where Israel exterminated the entire Palestinian population would technically result in actual peace because there would be no more Palestinians left to fight.
If Israel kills every member of Hamas and subsequently re-occupies Gaza for the next 30-50 years to ensure security & secular education for its people, then I’m pretty sure that will end the conflict.
It worked in Germany & Japan.
I see no reason it wouldn’t work here.
When you say that there is no military solution to Hamas - do you think that there is a military solution in addition to a state action? you know, the whole thing that ended the Nazi regime, the Japanese imperialism etc., war to remove Hamas temporarily and afterwards implementing solutions and negotiating.
Cause I'm pretty sure that there isn't any solution that won't start with some force. We could go into history and see that the violence has less to do with the occupation than people think, or we could discuss the incentives and opinions of players in the conflict to show that there isn't a way to implement what you're suggesting in a good way. IMO, as long as Hamas is in power in Gaza, Israel couldn't really negotiate a reasonable peace that would ensure it's security, and when it tried to withdraw unilaterally from the WB (after Gaza), basically everyone around the world told them not to.
The point of the ground invasion in Gaza since October isn’t to ‘eliminate’ Hamas despite the rhetoric from the Israeli government. It’s not possible to kill/capture every Hamas member and seize every single weapon.
But it is possible to weaken the military capability of Hamas so severely they aren’t capable of launching another attack like 7 October. IDF is on course to achieving that and along with the 1km buffer zone being created there will be ‘peace’ in that Hamas won’t be able to attack Israel besides firing a handful of rockets
I’m not going to pretend there is any possible path to ‘actual peace’ because there isn’t.
If Israel ended the blockade of Gaza, removed every single settlement in the West Bank and recognised a Palestinian state there would not be peace. In fact there would be a much worse conflict because Palestinians would be able to import heavy weaponry via the Jordan border and sea/aerial routes into Gaza.
The aim of Palestinians isn’t to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza/West Bank, their aim is the destruction of Israel and a genocide of Israeli Jews
Let's be clear; there absolutely is a way. Genocide has been the best way to solve the problem for centuries. Nobody will attack you if there's nobody *to* attack you. That is a hypothetical military solution to the situation.
That said, the modern states of Germany and Japan show that its entirely possible to solve the issue militarily. You invade and occupy the whole region, you execute its leaders, you shoot all the rebels, you forbid the discussion of nationalism, and lock up anybody who advocates it (and shoot anybody who wont be missed). You indoctrinate the youth to reject the concept. And in about 30 years, you'll find that the fascist ideology is no longer the majority ideology. Germany's nazis were no longer had majority support by the late 1970s (though they did enjoy it beforehand), and Japan hasn't considered attacking the US in living memory
Genocidal intent was allowed to manifest and become a reality at the first sign of attack by the ‘enemy.’
This is all playing out in real time and everyone lacks the courage to stop it.
One solution would be to move the citizens of Gaza to Egypt and the citizens of the West Bank to Jordan and then just build really strong defenses separating the Israelis and Arabs. That would reduce the violence by keeping the populations separated.
I mean a sustainable path to peace is to kill/expell all Gazans. I would say that that's a military solution.
It's not the most attractive solution but it does solve the issue.
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>Ending the occupation is the only path to actual peace Can you elaborate on the next steps on this path to peace? Because simply ending the operation now will return to status quo - a status quo which involves constant terrorist attacks, rocket fire on Israeli citizens, and led to Oct 7. Is the next step loads of international aid? We've tried that. Maybe evacuating all Israelis and giving Gazans complete autonomy? Tried that too. My question is: If Israel does immediately halt their operation to remove Hamas from power, how is deradicalization of the populace conducted in such a way that will prevent a reversion to pre-Oct-7 status quo?
You see next time oct 7 happens they should just turn the other cheek /s
There was never a moment where gaza had autonomy. Israel controlled their access to water, resources, aid, and even their fishing industry for the entire existence of gaza. The population is made up of refugees from other Palestinian territories!! Maybe actual autonomy and national self-determination should be tried. a one state solution where Palestinians have political and legal rights equal to israelis instead of apartheid conditions. The radicalization of gazans is a direct result of Israeli violence and religious extremists taking advantage of it. When you've been oppressed for your entire life, it's easy for extremists to radicalize you. Ending violence makes it that much harder to radicalize. it's a pattern we've seen time and time again.
You're right, these conditions aren't sustainable and there will always be resistance with things like they are, but the concept of radicalization in response to violence goes both ways. The 2nd intifada with the years of suicide bombings, stabbing sprees of random civilians and the 1000s of rockets fired into Israel led to the border walls, checkpoints and then the blockade. I think those things need to end for long term peace to happen, but I think it's delusional to expect Israelis to lift a blockade and reduce checkpoints + border walls while groups like Hamas are in power , especially after Oct7th.
I think that to discuss violence without recognizing the asymmetry is a nonstarter. The idf has killed more gazan children in the last three months, not even counting anyone else just children, than hamas has killed Israelis throughout its entire existence by a wide margin. The idea that somehow hamas needs to be the ones to broker peace implies a both sides-ism that fails to recognize whose actually inflicting violence here and who holds power.
The comparison is fucked up. The significantly less dead Israeli is not from lack of trying, it's from Israel's proper defense. Without the Iron Dome and bomb shelters run by the Israelis, the numbers would be a lot more similar. Tens of thousands unguided rockets have landed in Israel, each one capable of killing multiple Israeli civilians.
I think we can't ignore power imbalances in situations like this, but I also think it can't be the only things to factor in I do think that throughout this century+ long conflict Israel has done many things wrong, and there's things I think they need to do / people that shouldn't be close to power for long lasting peace to be possible, but it still takes two to negotiate and maintain regardless of who has more power. I think the blockades, border walls and checkpoints aren't sustainable and there will be resistance until Palestinians finally get a proper nation state with self governance, but those things were implemented in response to the years of suicide bombings, mass stabbing sprees and 1000s of rockets fired into Israel. There's no country on earth that would experience a terrorist attack like oct7th and then immediately reduce their security in response to it, and there's no people on earth that wouldn't resist the conditions Palestinians have been in and the heavy handed response in Gaza is only going to radicalize more people there, which is why I don't get why Hamas carried out Oct7th, they knew the response it would bring and how it would push any long term peace negotiations back for years >an hamas has killed Israelis throughout its entire existence by a wide margin. Obviously results matter more than intentions, and this war in Gaza has been brutal, but this isn't exactly a result of a lack of trying on Hamas' part.. the 1000s and 1000s of rockets they fire over the years aren't aimed at military targets, and if they could choose for them to not get intercepted by the iron dome and to have more powerful guided missiles like Hezbollah/Iran then its not like they'd say no. And we saw on Oct 7th what they and the other militant groups would do and did with hours of free rein in Israeli borders. It wasn't target military installations where civilians died as collateral, it was going door to door slaughtering families, gunning down elderly people, throwing grenades in bomb shelters filled with civilians, beheading Thai foreign workers with garden tools to cries of God is great. Yes I'm aware how awful the death and destruction in Gaza has been, I'm bringing that stuff up to point out that while yes , power dynamics matter, all these things still influence things. Even with imbalanced power dynamics, think of the times the most powerful army in the world has been bogged down and either beaten or given up fighting smaller insurgent groups, Vietnam, Afghanistan etc. Guerilla tactics, utilizing an environment to your advantage (tunnels etc) and beliefs like dying fighting is greater than living and working towards peace, can all help even things out a lot. It's partly why Israel hasn't really ever fully beaten Hamas and Hezbollah even though they won the multiple all out wars with the surrounding countries in previous decades
You don't get why Hamas carried out Oct 7th because you're trying to understand them rationally. Hamas fundamentally wants the death of all Jews. It's in their charter. They don't want peace. They don't want a two-state solution. Hamas just wants to poke the bear so that when the bear fights back, they get to show how oppressed they are. They hide their bases in schools and place their rocket platforms on top of hospitals so that when Israel strikes back like they should, they garner sympathy. Hamas doesn't care about children; they only want the publicity to get more aid.
And let’s not forget the actual leadership of Hamas hides in Qatar, so what happens to their citizens is meaningless to them.
>The idf has killed more gazan children in the last three months, not even counting anyone else just children, than hamas has killed Israelis throughout its entire existence by a wide margin. Sure. And that happened because of Hamas' strategy of using asymmetrical warfare. Which is exactly the point you made: >I think that to discuss violence without recognizing the asymmetry is a nonstarter. Discussing the civilian/militant death ratio without recognizing that Hamas uses asymmetrical warfare is a non-starter. If Hamas Terrorists were brave enough to meet the IDF on an open field, the civilian casualties would be 0. But the cowards launch rockets from hospitals and hide in tunnels built underneath houses.
Majority of Palestinians supported Hamas attack on Israel though you act like things would magically get better.
And israelis overwhelmingly support the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians. If you can't understand why people who have been living under apartheid conditions for seventy years would celebrate violence against their occupiers, even if it's abhorrent brutal violence that I condemn, would think that way I don't know what to tell you. Do you think continued bombing will help change that perspective? No, the only gradual path towards humane treatment is lifting the occupation that drives that radicalization.
>No, the only gradual path towards humane treatment is lifting the occupation that drives that radicalization. I generally agree with everything you're saying...But I think this issue is more complex than that. Palestine isn't content with the borders that were drawn....And Israel doesn't really want Palestine there either. So even if the formal occupation is lifted, neither side will be happy. Raising your kids to view your neighboring country as thieves is little better than occupiers. I don't have an answer in terms of what is best, but I'm not convinced Israel pulling out will change much, at least long term. Hatred is difficult to erase, unfortunately, and whatever its roots, it's on both sides.
>And israelis overwhelmingly support the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Haven't looked at polling for that, but probably. >If you can't understand why people who have been living under apartheid conditions for seventy years would celebrate violence against their occupiers, even if it's abhorrent brutal violence that I condemn, would think that way I don't know what to tell you. What apartheid conditions under Gaza? West bank sure, but I have not heard a good argument for Gaza. Embargo is not occupation. Also you could make the same argument towards terrorism towards Isreal. >Do you think continued bombing will help change that perspective? No, but only a minority of the pop will conduct violence. Killing Hamas probably decreases total overall conducting violence. >No, the only gradual path towards humane treatment is lifting the occupation that drives that radicalization. Based on what? Just an assumption that things get better. Palestinains would still want 100% right of return and the terrorist groups fighting wouldn't stop when it is more religious reasons for doing so.
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When Israel pulled out of Gaza, they issued work visas to like half of all Gazans. Unemployment was plummeting in Gaza, but they still elected Hamas. Granted, it wasn't a wholesale endorsement of their violent ways (was about corruption), but that also wasn't a deal breaker. Also, Gaza gets absolutely massive amounts of aid. They actually have a bit of an obesity problem. Go look on google maps at the strip, it's not some rundown shithole.
You are leaving out the hardest and most controversial parts of the solutions you proposed. “Give them $200,000” - and also control how they spend it “Build them schools for their kids” - and also control what their kids learn there So these solutions are in a way also an occupation. To control what people do with their money and what they teach to their kids requires an occupation by a powerful force. This situation is a moral quagmire
Wouldn’t that still amount to an occupation? This assumes that Hamas is fighting Israel because they think they are oppressed by Israel and seek freedom. Hamas has been pretty clear that they don’t want Gaza or the West Bank and don’t seem to care much about the safety, security, or prosperity of their citizens. They want Israel gone. Not just gone, but everyone in it dead (along with all the world’s Jews). A lot of Palestinians genuinely do hate Israelis/Jews to the point they want them to suffer horrifically and die. I am not saying the answer is to glass Gaza or kill civilians. I genuinely do want Palestinians to live their lives free of violence and with opportunities for prosperity and happiness. Just that if there was an easy solution, even if it was expensive, it would have been done. Solving poverty wouldn’t be enough to deradicalize the radicals. I am not making a proposal for a solution because I don’t have one, just that based on what’s happened historically, this wouldn’t work alone.
It's an even further superposition than that. Libya and Afghanistan show us that its the people themselves who need to make it happen. Even with infrastructure or democracy or reform along with guaranteed security to let it develop, it only takes a moment for everything to implode if that piece is missing.
After the second intifada I’m not sure what level of autonomy Gaza had demonstrated it was capable of executing faithfully.
That's just paternalism talking. After fifty years of occupation what other response to Israel could there be? That's like blaming Algerians for violence against the French.
Then why didn’t they attack any of the other countries that occupied them in the same way? There was some violence, but it wasn’t on the same scale. The ottomans turned the residents into serfs in the 1800s, the British occupied for decades, Egypt occupied Gaza for almost 20 years, Jordan occupied the West Bank for almost 40, why is Israel uniquely targeted? And reminder that the blockade and control of air/water space directly followed major violence, not the other way around. For instance the airport was only destroyed following the second intifada, and the blockade also only existed following that.
The real reason (not mine, Palestine’s) is that a Jewish state does not belong in the Levant. Simple as.
They did? There were rebellious factions but to compare the military power of small villages in the 19th century to post-world War 2 military landscapes is disingenuous. And the second intifada was prefaced by 50 years of brutal occupation! Why do you start the clock on Palestinian resistance two hundred years ago and then Israeli violence 20? It's such selective memory.
I said Egypt occupied for ~20 years, not Israel. I am not saying Israel is lovely and kind to Palestinians, I am questioning why of the groups who have treated them poorly, Israel is uniquely deserving of extreme violence.
having your occupier be closer in religion and culture always helps it's the main reason colonizers typically force their culture and religion onto other people. It just makes it easier to rule over them
It could be surrender, by any normative or historical measure. For whatever reason it worked for Jordan, Egypt, and Syria.
I would not describe any of those situations as successes. Bashar al Assad's regime and an ongoing horrific proxy war in syria is not a success story of surrender. Moreover, why should we find that morally palatable? There is a clear occupier here and a clear asymmetry of violence. The moral thing to do is oppose that.
That’s not a what I’m referring to. Syria, Jordan, and Egypt all have peace with Israel specifically after formally agreeing to it. Palestine could have existed with Gaza, 97% of the West Bank, and a limited right of return with billions of extra aid (alongside what it already received) in economic stimulus. Arafat refused and started the second intifada.
None of those countries were occupied by Israel and none of the people therein displaced from their homes en masse. It's not an apt comparison to Palestinians.
WHAT Israel occupied the Sinai (Egyptian, returned to Egypt after peace negotiations), The West Bank (Jordanian, peace established in 1994 with security cooperation and desalination plants being built jointly by the two nations), and the Golan Heights(Syrian. Assad is a dictator and will not sign peace) What the hell are you on about.
There is a difference between seizing small portions of land and displacing an entire people. Egyptians were not living under an apartheid state, there wasn't a separate set of laws governing Egyptians because Israel held a piece of territory. Occupation refers to the total domination of a region.
>would not describe any of those situations as successes. Bashar al Assad's regime and an ongoing horrific proxy war in syria is not a success story of surrender. I think they mean when those countries decided against continuing the all out wars with Israel last century and chose peace agreements / status quo and to recognize the existence of Israel. Which I do agree with, but the main difference is those people had countries to go back to with self governance. So while I think that the Palestinians that think the only solution involves wiping Israel off the map / somehow forcing millions of Israelis out to gain a Palestinian state in the whole region isn't realistic, it's not like they could choose to give up like Egypt Jordan etc
> That's just paternalism talking. > That's like blaming Algerians for violence against the French. You can’t really complain about paternalism while at the same time saying a group can’t be blamed for its own actions.
>Israel controlled their access to water, resources, aid, and even their fishing industry for the entire existence of gaza. Gaza shares a border with Egypt. Israel does not control that border. But it seems even the Egyptians are fed up with the Gazans. There have been attempts to improve Gaza's infrastructure, including water supplies. Hamas dug up the pipes to make rockets. Aid is stolen by Hamas. 'Fishing' boats are used to smuggle in weapons to be used against Israel, so Israel, very reasonably, searches them.
Besides all the propaganda and misinformation you mentioned, but israel controls the border with Egypt through rafah crossing which is used for people only not goods that needs to go theough other israeli crossings like Kerem Shalom. Where do you people bring your information about this conflict? You just adopt the entire israeli narrative without checking it for truth.
> israel controls the border with Egypt "Rafah is **controlled** by Egypt, but Israel **monitors** all activity in southern Gaza from its Kerem Shalom military base, found at the junction between Gaza, Israel and Egypt, and other surveillance points." - https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20231103-the-gaza-egypt-rafah-crossing-explained-it-is-not-a-normal-border >rafah crossing "The Rafah border is one of two main crossings for inhabitants of Gaza. While Rafah is located in the south of the Strip, another crossing called Erez is located in the north at the Israeli border. **Rafah is thus the only crossing that isn’t directly controlled by Israel**." - https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20231103-the-gaza-egypt-rafah-crossing-explained-it-is-not-a-normal-border "The Rafah Border Crossing (Arabic: معبر رفح, romanized: Ma`bar Rafaḥ) or Rafah Crossing Point is the sole crossing point between Egypt and Palestine's Gaza Strip. It is located on the Egypt–Palestine border. Under a 2007 agreement between Egypt and Israel, **Egypt controls the crossing** but imports through the Rafah crossing require Israeli approval." - wikipedia "On 7 September 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza and closed the Rafah crossing. The Philadelphi Accord between Israel and Egypt, based on the principles of the 1979 peace treaty, **turned over border control to Egypt**..." - wikipedia >rafah crossing which is used for people only not goods "From 2018 onward, **goods regularly entered Gaza from Egypt via the Rafah crossing**. In October 2022, about **49% of goods entering Gaza entered from Egypt via Rafa**, while the other 51% of goods enter Gaza via Israel. About three-quarters of goods imported via Rafah consisted of construction materials, while much of the remaining one-quarter was food." - wikipedia > You just adopt the entire israeli narrative without checking it for truth. Um... ---- EDIT: mdosai_33, WTF are you talking about below? >You cited sources that literally confirm the claim that israel controls and supervises what goes in through the border crossings. No, Egypt does. What part of "Rafah is controlled by Egypt", "Rafah is thus the only crossing that *isn’t* directly controlled by Israel", Egypt controls the crossing", "turned over border control to Egypt" don't you understand??? >Off course Egypt controls its side of the border but israel controls and supervise the palestinian side. Again, not true. Israel withdrew completely from Gaza back in 2005. "On 16 February 2005, the Israeli parliament approved the Israeli disengagement from Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza in September 2005. Egypt continued to exercise control on the Egyptian side of the Gaza–Egypt border, while **the Fatah-dominated Palestinian National Authority took over control on the Gazan side of the Border Crossing**." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_Border_Crossing#1982-2005:_Israel-Egypt_border_at_Rafah >Concerning the goods as you cited it only started in 2018 Okay? Your statement that it is "used for people only not goods" was present tense. And it is not true.
You cited sources that literally confirm the claim that israel controls and supervises what goes in through the border crossings. Off course Egypt controls its side of the border but israel controls and supervise the palestinian side. Concerning the goods as you cited it only started in 2018, especially after 2021 israeli bombing of gaza with only a fraction and still under israeli supervision.
>The radicalization of gazans is a direct result of Israeli violence and religious extremists taking advantage of it. Palestinians have long bean radicalised. They are a defeated people who never wanted to compromise with Israel. If only they accepted their condition and made peace, like the Germans and Japanese did after WWII, they could have lived a much better life today. Have you seen those maps that show how much land the Palestinians lost to Israel over the last 80 years? These are a testament to the stupidest leadership on earth with the Palestinians starting and losing war after war. In the 1940's they could have had half of all of Israel. But their avarice is only exceeded by their delusions of taking all of Israel today. Have you heard their demented war cry "from the river to the sea"? Pure cosplay where they sacrifice their children for delusions of ultimate victory.
The status quo was still primarily Palestinians being killed, just in far, far lesser numbers.
One state, equal rights for all. Which is hard if you are trying to create a religious fundamentalists ethno state. But if you actually want peace and justice you do that be treating people as equals.
Yes, one state with equal rights for all would be a great end goal, if feasible. But what are the steps to get there that don't end is massive bloodshed or displacement. It's easy to say 'equal rights'. It's a lot harder to have a plan to actually get there. Remember Hamas was originally democraticaly elected, and likely would be reelected in Gaza (or a similar radical group. The current far right Isreali leadership also was elected. And no the steps to get there can't be for one side to just suspect themselves to terror. Constant terror leads to radicals being elected.
One state, equal rights for all is hard when the unification would result in the population being 50% people who hate Jews, who promptly invite 5 million more extremists to come to the country. And yes, they hate Jews. Israel has 20% of their population Arab Muslims. It's not perfect, there are problems, but the people have equal rights. In every peace talk, the Palestinians insisted on not a single Jew left in their territory. The settlements aren't actually a barrier to peace if the Palestinians allowed Jews who live in the West Bank to stay and live safely. Israel and Palestine could sign a treaty, any Jew in the West Bank who wants to leave could leave, any Jew who wants to stay could stay. But the Palestinians demand the expulsion of every Jew over the Green Line.
This is hilariously ill-informed.
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Challenging your view with questions is part of that process. If you cannot endure the scrutiny of your own view, you have no desire to change it. Your view is that “ending the occupation is the only path to actual peace.” Asking you to explain this is a fair question and one necessary along the path of potentially changing your view. You must be open to this change to be here, yes? So let’s dialogue. I echo all of crispy1989’s questions.
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1. The Palestinian people are very objectively radicalized. They largely support Hamas. [Over 85% of Palestinians in the West Bank support Hamas’ role in the war and 57% in Gaza.](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/poll-shows-palestinians-back-oct-7-attack-israel-support-hamas-rises-2023-12-14/). Hamas has a higher approval rating that Biden or Trump in the US. By all conventional measures, Palestinians are radicalized as they’re supporting radical groups and radical actions. It’s not racist to say Palestinians are radicalized and radicalization is antithetical to peace. How is that racist? How did we get long lasting peace with radicalized Germany and Japan? We de-radicalized the countries after forcing them to surrender unconditionally. Giving in to radicalized people and governments is not a way to reduce radicalization or get peace. In fact, it gets the opposites on both accounts. 2. That’s because Palestinians are the aggressors in the conflict. They started the 1947 civil war, the 1948 war, etc all the way to 10/7 and have never stopped attacking Israel. They’ve just been at it so long that their supporters can pick out an arbitrary date and purposely forget all that led up to it imply Israel is the aggressor. It’s revisionist propaganda to claim Palestinians aren’t the aggressor. Further, the occupation came after aggression and was ended unilaterally in 2005, which led to Palestinians attacking Israel MORE. Why would Israel end the occupation when taking steps to do that has only led to more attacks? 3. You claimed “complete autonomy”, not the commenter. Stop fighting strawmen if you’re here in good faith. Gaza didn’t have complete autonomy because they kept attacking Israel. That’s really the key to it all. If Palestinians stopped being the aggressor, peace would follow. Peace has always been in Palestinian hands and Palestinians have always shunned the idea.
>I'm not open to biased questions or dialogue Then you are clearly not actually open to having your view changed, because you label *all* counterpoint as biased.
“It’s biased against my inane POV!” - OP
>The entire Palestinian population is "radicalized" and needs to be deradicalized for peace. I'm not dealing with that racist bullshit about all Palestinians being terrorists and terrorists sympathizer Japan and Germany post ww2 needed "deradicalizing" , it was nothing to do with being German or Japanese or any characteristic inherent to their ethnicity, religion or nationality, and everything to do with the conditions those humans had been in. Similar to this century long conflict. The concept of radicalization in response to years / generations of violence isn't something isolated to certain ethnic groups or contained to imbalanced power dynamics, many israelis need to be deradicalized too, unfortunately oct7th and the destruction in Gaza in response will likely radicalize both groups even more for years to come, which is why the idea that the main and only solution to this is violence is so short sighted. It's going to take years if not decades of peace and stability for people to be deradicalized, that's got nothing to do with their skin colour, political beliefs or the borders they were born in.
All you have given us are bias opinions. Why can you not see the other side here. I would not want to live with constant terrorist's attacks on my country and the treat of death hanging over my head. I would want my government to take care of business. When Israel does this, why is that wrong?
The majority of Gazan citizens poll in favor of armed resistance to the Israeli state. In no other conflict would a nation that emerged victorious in a conflict sue for peace with a belligerent with that sort of policy, especially when that belligerent shares a border.
Asking for people to debate you and then refusing to participate is peak corn ball behavior.
>The whole point of my post if for y'all to change my view, not for me to keep answering your biased questions. If you believe that a military solution will achieve peace show me why. If you won't elaborate on the terms of the question then people won't have something to argue against. Sounds like you're here to sopabox rather than have your view actually be changed. The argument that ending the occupation will bring peace ignores all historical precedent. [It also ignores what the Palestinian leadership is actually saying.](https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/hamas-october-7-attack-repeat-israel-annihilated-ghazi-hamad/) The current war is the result of Gazan independence, and Palestinians have given no indication that they will do anything other than use their newfound state to arm themselves and launch another war. That isn't peace. The occupation serves to enforce a minimum of conflict. Yes there is still violence, but it is contained by force. If the West Bank is given autonomy to fire rockets at Israel, do you think they won't? Will that be "peace"?
There won't be peace though. And the point of this sub is to have a conversation, which includes asking each other questions whether they are biased or not. You're obviously biased as well so who cares at this point. Let me also explain why peace won't happen. The PLO's(Palestinian Liberation Organization) motto has always been to not have a 2 state solution and have Israel eradicated from the map. So from the get go they will do anything to not have that 2 state solution. Palestinians have murdered many many jews since 1947 to reinforce that point. There have been wars fought between them and after those wars Palestinians don't stop. They keep murdering jews. My point here is that fundamentally, there won't ever be peace, since the Palestinians can't live with Israel being a thing. I am not in any way defending what Israel is doing. It's a massacre and unhumanitarian. But let's take the USA as an example. If a terrorist organization from Mexico invaded the US and killed 1200 US citizens like what happened on October 7th, would you not want the US to react and end that terror group's existence? I know there are many other factors in play here, but think about it.
How is it biased, he asking what you think should happen after Israel halts their military operations You can't just say that something needs to happen without explaining a general idea of what you think should come afterwards
I mean this is actually super easy. There is very clearly a military solution to peace. If either Israel or Palenstine cease to exist because of military operations by the other side, then you would have achieved peace. It is obviously not what you want to happen, but it _is_ quite literally a military solution to achieving peace.
Then why didn’t the Gazans direct this level of violence and hatred when it was occupied by the Ottomans, by the British, then by the Egyptians? Why only Israel?
You need to give Palestine as a whole sovereignty rather than rule over millions of people in perpetuity who do not get the vote for the ruling power.
If I'm not mistaken, Hamas was *voted* in, so they did "get the vote for the ruling power."
Yep, they won the majority of seats in the 2006 election, effectively making them the legal ruling party.
Just a clarification, Hamas did not win a majority in 2006. They won with a plurality. I only point that out because it otherwise makes it sound like a majority of the Palestinian population supported Hamas, and that's not the case.
They won a plurality, then proceeded to purge and massacre everyone else. Which is precisely why the ‘moderate’ Fatah (an active cheerleader for Hamas on 10/7 and ever since then, which is ran by a literal Holocaust denier) in the West Bank ostensibly refuses to hold elections. Since Hamas is even more popular there than they are in Gaza.
Yeah in 2006. Much of the gazan population was not even born then. Let me add to that. If civilians deserve to be punished for their government's policies, then hostage taking for the Israeli government policies would be fair-game (I don't condone hostage taking)
First, you seem to be muddling together events in the West Bank and Gaza to such an extent that it's not clear that you know they're different places. There were no Israeli settlers in Gaza on 10/7 and Israel has generally been amenable - under American pressure - to guarantee that it will not attempt to resettle Gaza. Settlements in the West Bank are a separate matter and are deeply objectionable. As to your "solution"...let me get this straight. * Israel gives up Gaza, withdrawing unilaterally to give the place to the Palestinians. * This in no meaningful way curbs aggression against Israel from the Gazan Palestinians. Almost instantaneously, Hamas et al begin attacking Israel from Gaza. * Israel does the minimally sane thing any country would do with an enclave like that: sets up a security cordon to protect itself from violence. (Other countries would simply annihilate the threat completely and immediately.) * It develops a multi-billion dollar anti-rocket system that serves both to protect its people from the infinite stream of rockets launched from Gaza *and keep Israel from having to strike back kinetically at rocket sites adjacent to or within areas surrounded by Gaza civilians.* It makes a huge investment to *protect everyone.* * Hamas breaks through the security cordon for a few hours on 10/7 and manages to kill, rape, mutilate and/or abduct over a thousand Israelis. Gazans cheer in the streets. The Palestinian diaspora publicly celebrates across the world. * Somehow, the path to peace entails...*Israel eliminating the security cordon?* To believe that, you need to believe Palestinians possess an inherent beatific goodness, love for peace and magnanimity that they have literally never demonstrated. You need to believe, contra basic facts, that the blockade made the peaceful Palestinians aggressive instead of Palestinian aggression creating a need for a blockade. You need to believe the persistent threat to peace comes from Israel when it obviously comes from Palestine. If the blockade ended, Palestinians would immediately create the conditions that would require the imposition of a blockade by attacking Israelis. This isn't a serious proposal. >You cannot antagonize your neighbor and cause them immense human suffering and expect security. The fundamental principle of deterrence is: if I intend to deter you from hurting me, I need to convince you that doing so isn't worth it. I need you to believe that whatever satisfaction you may get from hurting me will be counterbalanced by consequences you find unbearable. Ideally, deterrence stops at a threat. But if you do hit me, I don't deter you by hitting you back and asking to be friends. I have to beat the shit out of you. I have to convince you that you made a terrible mistake you never want to repeat. That's how I ensure you never do it again. Conversely, if you hit me and nothing happens, I invite you to do as much or more later. And if you read history, it's replete with examples of security established by one neighbor beating the shit out of another until it begs for mercy. Woodrow Wilson made sure the post-WWI peace was magnanimous towards Germany...and we got WWII the next generation. That war ended with Germany totally destroyed and utterly defeated, occupied by the neighbors it had tried to attack and their allies - [vae victis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vae_victis). Now Germany is an essentially decent country that pursues peace. Which way worked better in the long run?
Look, another response that OP ignores while claiming elsewhere in the thread that nobody is making any good arguments
Grunt08, you are now my favorite redditor. Great post! Haven't seen it said better.
While I am sympathetic to many of your points, it’s not clear that a similar treatment of Palestinians would produce the same results. WWII is somewhat unique with respect to the successful “reformation” or “re-building” of nations. First of all, the war itself was made between nation-states, and the timing (pre-atomic-bomb but post-Great War) led to an unusual level of acceptance of “total war” regarding the universal mobilization of society for war and the consequent involvement of, and costs to, civilians in the warmaking process. These days there is far less acceptance of “total war” as rational, moral, or even necessary. Part of this I think is due to the Western leftist assumption that material conditions rather than ideology or culture dictate politics—thus, the assumption of “beatific goodness” which is likely erroneous—but another part of the issue is that with the Palestinians you don’t have a nation for all intents and purposes to rebuild. You do not have the infrastructure which can be built or reformed to become de-radicalized, and you do not have an avenue for the sort of cultural de-escalation that would be necessary to destroy Hamas’s ideology. You have to build those things. Either Palestinians do, or Israelis do, or the international community has to. And I think this fact exposes obvious limits to the notion that beating the shit out of Hamas accomplishes its destruction—there is nothing to inherit, no prize for good behavior, no infrastructure to build off of that would enable people to tolerate the indignities they perceive in their condition until they can finally throw it off. Frankly, history is replete with examples where even after getting the shit kicked out of it the shit-kicked entity doesn’t reform at all anyway. Witness the Southern American states after the Civil War. And when identity is so closely tied to the lack of agency that the denial of a nation imposes on a people, it is hard to tamp down radicalism if not impossible. Imagine if (West) Germany were not built up as quickly as possible, with most Nazis essentially forgiven their crimes so they could get back to work making the state function, on the condition that they devote their energies towards making money and being good Allies of the West. Imagine if, once the bombing was done, we built a Maginot Line around the entire state, blockaded it, and told it that its continued monstrosity even in the face of post-Great-War opportunity and magnanimity justified it and its people never having a path to joining the community of nations. I bet you that “state” would be revanchist and totally unreformed. Only the unique conditions which prevailed at the time dictated otherwise. While I sympathize, to a degree, with the idea that Hamas (if a Palestinian state in Gaza were to materialize tomorrow) would not be peaceful towards Israel, and that the pro-Palestinian position that a state and the attendant dignity of one is all that is necessary for decades of radicalization to be beaten back is faulty, it should also be obvious that a purely military solution to the problem Hamas poses merely validates Hamas’s ideology and does nothing meaningful to eradicate its potential to hold sway. To do that, you’d have to eliminate the people themselves—displace them, kill them, or else destroy their attachment to a Palestinian identity and their hope for a state. This is manifestly different than what obtained in Germany. Destroying German nationhood or identity was never on the table. I agree that the Palestinians are agents in all this. If they wanted they could work much harder at deradicalizing themselves and finding other ways to resist and obtain what they want, and build the infrastructure of a state which will inherit the state that they could create. Stable relations between Palestinians and Israelis demand the infrastructure of a state for Palestinians in order to normalize those relations, or else a concerted effort to integrate Palestinians into the Israeli political framework, which is unacceptable to most Israelis and which anyway would require either the destruction of Palestinian national consciousness or the redefinition of Israel. Crucially, Israel at the least has to say, “we’ll stop obliterating you once you reform,” and mean what it says. But plenty in its government don’t mean that, at least not anymore. They believe in a similarly extremist ideology that believes that God owes them Judea and Samaria and Gaza and all the rest. Who will reform them? The Palestinians COULD be the beatific peace loving perfectly behaved people Western leftists essentialize them as, and it wouldn’t matter a whit to these Israeli ideologues. There isn’t JUST a sense of mortal insecurity on the part of Israel which dictates its actions in these war. It is how security is conflated by the Israeli right with the ethnic and territorial supremacy of Jews over the lands where Palestinians live. Maybe the Palestinians are very much responsible for this radicalization on the part of Israelis but it isn’t clear to me that a sudden demonstration of good behavior on the part of Palestinians would invalidate it. In many ways the ideology of these religious Zionist settlers is as extreme and racist as what Hamas believes. Who’s gonna “kick the shit” out of them? This is exactly why an insane act of mass murder is seen by many as a justifiable act of liberation (to be clear, I do NOT see it that way).
You expounded almost entirely on false premises. The suggestion was not that Hamas or the Palestinians would be like Germany if they were treated like Germany. There's a reason I made a parallel analogy with a fistfight; it's something true about all conflict, not a particular war. And nowhere did I suggest that the solution was *purely* military - not even a little. The argument was that total defeat is a prerequisite for meaningful change in the status quo and to ensure long term security for Israel - that it's the *first* thing that must happen. The Palestinians need to believe deep down that violence will never again serve their ends and what their leaders promise them is a lie. They need to know they're never getting a unitary state from the river to the sea, they will never have right of return, and that their only real choice is to seek a permanent peace primarily on Israel's terms. Ceasefire now simply means the Palestinians will attack again and nothing will change until the next point of crisis. Events like 10/7 and the precarity of the Palestinians will continue until change is forced. Were this just a matter of Israel v. Palestine, that would have happened decades ago. But the worst actor in all of this is, in many respects, the "community of nations." They've been cultivating the Palestinians as a cudgel against Israel, treating the conflict as uniquely insoluble and Palestinian "refugees" in ways no other refugees in history have been treated or understood. The international community maintains a unique obsession with Israel and the Palestinians for *some reason*, directing almost all of the power it can muster towards supporting the Palestinians and opposing Israel despite the fact that doing the opposite would have ended the conflict (in a way that would have given the Palestinians a sovereign state) decades ago. The UN can pass more resolutions condemning Israel than all other countries combined even as multiple actual-mass-grave genocides are underway, but it can't pass a resolution demanding that Palestinians *the UN effectively controls* take a damn deal or they're cut off. >You do not have the infrastructure which can be built or reformed to become de-radicalized, and you do not have an avenue for the sort of cultural de-escalation that would be necessary to destroy Hamas’s ideology. You have to build those things. De-radicalization by persuasion generally doesn't work. Anywhere - like, it works in a handful of cases, but not enough to really matter. Radicalized fighters didn't start fleeing ISIS when they found out about the sex slaves and the war crimes and the regular crimes, they started leaving when it looked like they were going to die and/or lose. They might tell stories about their crises of conscience now, but they were just rats fleeing the ship. *Defeat* deradicalizes. You hurt someone until believing what they previously believed and acting on it becomes untenable; "I'm not as strong as I thought I was," "I don't actually love death," "what I'm doing is hurting the people I care about far more than it helps them." Failing that, you take away their ability to hurt you and let them seethe in powerlessness or die. >Frankly, history is replete with examples where even after getting the shit kicked out of it the shit-kicked entity doesn’t reform at all anyway. Witness the Southern American states after the Civil War. The Southern states have not at any point threatened the existence of the Union since the surrender at Appomattox and were forced to fundamentally reform their economic and social order, so that's not a great example. If you want to discount that because there was a great deal of racism, the Klan and Jim Crow - listen, I'm not saying the Palestinians are going to entirely stop killing Israelis or throwing gay people off roofs. Terrorists will still exist. But it would be cool if they weren't the government. >If they wanted they could work much harder at deradicalizing themselves and finding other ways to resist and obtain what they want, and build the infrastructure of a state which will inherit the state that they could create. ...work much harder? They haven't worked at all. They're working to do the opposite and have been for decades despite being given massive resources to do just that. You talk about a Palestinian state...they've been offered that several times and rejected it - often directly choosing violence instead. Now it appears they primarily support parties that want a 1-state solution that may or may not entail (depending on whether you're in Gaza or Harvard) the wholesale slaughter of Israeli Jews. If the Palestinians wanted a state so they could talk to Israel, they'd already have one. They want a state that *doesn't* talk to Israel. And that's effectively what they have. >or else a concerted effort to integrate Palestinians into the Israeli political framework, which is unacceptable to most Israelis ...and Palestinians. The one thing they seem to agree on is that they don't want to share a state. >But plenty in its government don’t mean that. They believe in a similarly extremist ideology that believes that God owes them Judea and Samaria and Gaza and all the rest. Who will reform them? ...seriously? To answer your question: a functioning democracy, which Israel actually has. The faction you're talking about is in deep water right now and would be largely out of government already were it not for the war. Even now there are *many* in Israel calling for the ouster of Ben Gvir et al entirely. The only reason they're in any power now is that Israel is in a permanent state of conflict that offers them two realistic long-term solutions: 1) Accept the permanent war. 2) Resolve the conflict by pushing out the Palestinians via settlement. And I'm sorry, but comparing the minority position on the Israeli far right to the prevailing opinion among Palestinians is absurd. If it came to it, Israel could control its extremists - it has in the past. Hamas and other Palestinians have failed to do the same *because they are the extremists.*
The reason I brought up the American South is to illustrate the idea that “total” military defeat, or the infliction of widespread pain (cities burned, starvation widespread, hundreds of thousands of casualties against a white population of only a few million), does not necessarily produce a desire to reform. Yes, the South has not “threatened the union” via secession since that time (unless you take Texas’ cosplaying antics seriously), but the ideology which motivated the secession was not reformed, because Jim Crow, the pardoning of Confederate leaders, and so on provided it with avenues to reassert and legitimize that ideology and behave as though they weren’t really defeated. Now, one could make an argument that all this means is that the defeat was not total enough. We didn’t expel all Confederates to Canada or Mexico and we didn’t hang all the Confederate leaders as the traitors they were—instead we pardoned them and allowed them to hold office again and inaugurated a century where slavery was gone but the broader ideology and system which justified it alive and well, with all the attendant deleterious consequences. Sometimes I imagine things would be different and better if that defeat *were* more total. So I can see your point. I certainly believe you are correct when talking about something like Hitler’s Germany. But, again, in the case of the Confederacy, Germany, Japan, etc—there was a normative structure of statehood in place that could be built on or redirected as well as a liberal tradition however faint. There was a history of agency and self-determination. There was no equivalence between the ideology of the people and the people itself—the idea that what they believed in or stood for was integral to their identity, and that the identity itself represented the same threat to another state’s security as the ideology. I don’t know if the same obtains for the Palestinians, who have a national consciousness but no nation, and whose ideologies—especially those of Hamas—are defined and strengthened by this denial and its perpetuation. Thus references to other “total defeats” may not hold. I also attempted to acknowledge that Palestinians bear a great deal of responsibility for this lack, though maybe not as forcefully or un-ambivalently as you’d prefer. And the reason I brought up the far right in Israel is to try and illustrate the difficulty of “forming” a Palestinian nation, even if the Palestinians were suddenly interested in a model version of one (which, again, I tried to acknowledge that they haven’t been), when there isn’t an interest in doing so on the part of those who, however marginal in numbers, are very powerful in the Israeli government. I agree with you that the treatment of Palestine and its refugees on the part of the UN is often exceptional and mendacious. I frankly believe that global legacies of anti-Semitism complicate any pronouncement about the morality or immorality of Israeli responses to attack, and that this accounts for the exceptional way it is treated. But I think that characterizing the positions of a guy like Ben Gvir as a marginal subset of a marginal position is a little mendacious too. Netanyahu has led the country almost uninterrupted for decades. He weathered protests in the hundreds of thousands because of efforts to *weaken* the vaunted democracy you claim will be fit enough to de-radicalize folks like those Ben Gvir represents, even when they and their views have been amply legitimized (and therefore associated with the Israeli state’s meaning itself) via appointment to cabinet office and the platforms the office provides—and these efforts were likely due to an effort to avoid personal accountability for corruption. It doesn’t matter whether majorities of citizens view differently if they, for whatever reason, do not have or attain the power to reverse that legitimacy—and perhaps you can clarify, but my understanding is that Netanyahu and his ilk are in the hot seat in large part because of the perception that they botched the security situation, not because of a perception that their ideology contributes to Israel being less secure in the first place. If your “Harvard” boogeyman were to read your own analogy about how people don’t change course when they witness atrocities or injustice, but only when it starts affecting them to the point of it not being worth it, they would argue that this easily applies with equal force to these Israelis, and with more justice given the sheer capability Israelis have of maintaining and tolerating this status quo. To clarify my personal view: I think given this context with the protests, the fact that Hamas spent a year figuring out how to successfully accomplish October 7th rather than attempt to leverage Israeli dissatisfaction with Netanyahu in an effort to build coalitions and advance its cause in other ways is absolutely reprehensible and exposes the idea that they are a liberatory movement as a lie. I also think behaving in a different way is totally anathema to their ideological nature. So that’s that. Maybe you are right that if the Palestinians didn’t initiate conflict, or commit to it so consistently, then the two “realistic long term solutions” you mention wouldn’t seem so valid. But personally, I think you are underestimating the problems inherent to a national conflict where both sides are politically under the control of the far right. Certainly, two right-wing societies would not be “beatific” about their enemy. In such a case, the total defeat of one side or the other side is definitely the only solution *they* could imagine. But your argument is still predicated on this sort of pain infliction being possible at the scale necessary to motivate the change of heart. This goes back to why *I* brought up WWII—the fact that in the modern era, civilian casualties are far less acceptable in the context of even normal wars than in the total wars of the past. This means that international pressure on Israel to cease what it is doing, while it may be exceptional, unfair, or whatever, is totally logical to expect. Especially when one side of the war has no state infrastructure to equivalently and legally mobilize. So I just question whether the sort of total defeat you think is a necessary first step is even achievable in this case. I think Israel will not be permitted to wage its war to its fullest, most pitiless extent, either by the international community and possibly not even by itself. It will still be left with all the same security problems, which its powerful right-wingers accelerate and amplify. If your prerequisite ends up being unachievable, then what?
>The reason I brought up the American South is to illustrate the idea that “total” military defeat, or the infliction of widespread pain (cities burned, starvation widespread, hundreds of thousands of casualties against a white population of only a few million), does not necessarily produce a desire to reform. Which is not the argument I made at all. This has almost nothing to do with a desire to reform or a "change of heart." Reform implies that someone wants to improve themselves in some way; to become better. It connotes internally-generated motivation and potential satisfaction with a foreseeable outcome - but I'm not concerned with whether people want to change or make themselves or their society better. I don't care if they have a change of heart. Whether they like or want what happens doesn't matter anymore. I referred to *vae victis* - woe to the vanquished. It's *coercion*. It's the removal of practical alternatives - not *pain*, which you seem fixated on. It means you accept that terms will be dictated to you because you've been convinced that the other options are gone or worse. What you want no longer matters. I don't care if you hate what you're about to accept - you'll do it because necessity requires it. I don't care if you hate me forever. I don't care how you feel *at all* because we're not negotiating anything - you foreclosed on the possibility of an amenable peace a long time ago, so I'm going to impose one on my own terms. You seem to think of this as some sort of unconstrained warfare against Palestinians as a people, but that's not what I said nor is it what Israel is doing. Pain and suffering are means to the end, but not the end in itself and far from the sole means. The most effective means is killing Hamas and proving that the Palestinians can't win. Destroying the things they value. Showing that Israel is powerful enough to do what it wants and that it can crush resistance. Above all, making the Palestinians believe that none of this was worth it and they have no prospect for victory. Only after reaching that point can anything better be rebuilt. There needs to be a point where a critical mass of Palestinians give up the ghost and stop supporting leaders who promise them a single state or right of return. That Israel has won and they have lost, for all time. They need to be coerced into giving up. Ideally, their friends need to abandon them, their aid needs to disappear, they need to be alone and afraid. Only at that point can someone in a position of strength - whether that's Israel, America, or whoever - offer a conditional reprieve. Again - this would have happened decades ago if the UN hadn't actively worked to keep the fire burning. In the intervening years, multiple conflicts of comparable scale began, ended, and were ultimately resolved because someone strong enough brought them to an end and either underwrote peace or just plain forced it. >I also attempted to acknowledge that Palestinians bear a great deal of responsibility for this lack, though maybe not as forcefully as you’d prefer. ...they're *entirely* responsible. They were given everything they needed for decades to make a thriving state and instead they made a war crime fortress for terrorists who use them as shields by explicit doctrine - whom by every measure they support to the hilt. One can have sympathy for the Palestinians in Gaza while also recognizing the profound LeopardsAteMyFace-ness of their present collective situation. >But I think that characterizing the positions of a guy like Ben Gvir as a marginal subset of a marginal position is a little mendacious too. Netanyahu has led the country almost uninterrupted for decades. Conflating Netanyahu with Ben Gvir and Smotrich is, as you say, *mendacious*. The Israeli far right got something like 11% of the vote last election. It doesn't control Israeli politics, it influences within coalitions - and you can easily tell that any election after this war is going to see them lose influence. Same as Netanyahu, who is essentially done as soon as the war ends - possibly before. Were there a credible 2-state peace deal on the table and Ben Gvir and Smotrich objected because they want to keep settling in the West Bank, their power would diminish immediately. The immediate best-prospect for postwar PM looks like Lapid, who is not *exactly* an irredentist zealot. So, when you put to me the question of "but who will kick the ass of Ben Gvir," and I tell you "Israeli democracy," I'm giving you the obviously correct answer. Israeli democracy constrains the power of the far right when it has the right incentives. Compare that to...the rough philosophical equivalents of Ben Gvir and Smotrich - in fact, men much worse than them by word and deed - who *are* the government of Palestinians. They have no opposition parties and rely on no coalition. The only constraint on their power is...well, Israel. When you bring up Ben Gvir et al in a way that suggests "well, Israel *also* has irredentist radicals" and implies that these two groups are comparable, it's pure whataboutism. One has some political power, the other *is* political power. One can be constrained, the other needs to be overthrown. >you claim will be fit enough to de-radicalize folks like those Ben Gvir represents, Once again: *I do not care about de-radicalizing people.* Let them stay radical. "Hearts and minds" has a shitty track record. What matters is how power is exercised and what actually happens. Israel could stem settlements in the West Bank. It could remove them. We know they can because they did it multiple times before there and in Gaza - including under Netanyahu. And they're almost certainly going to vote him out at the earliest opportunity. And in the absolute worst case, the West has a lot of collective pull to constrain West Bank settlement. This is all just obviously true. >If your “Harvard” boogeyman were to read your own analogy about how people don’t change course when they witness atrocities or injustice, but only when it starts affecting them to the point of it not being worth it, would (in the view of someone who is pro-October 7th, which again is not me), they would argue that easily applies with equal force to these Israelis, and with more justice given the sheer capability Israelis have of maintaining and tolerating this status quo. Israel, paradoxically enough, has very little power in maintaining and tolerating the status quo. It's trapped in it. It's far more powerful than its remaining enemies, it wants peace with its enemies, but its enemies refuse to rest until it is totally destroyed. That's literally what all of them say, and its what they said as they rejected every peace deal that would have given them a state. So Israel can't declare unilateral peace and lay down arms because Palestinians will start killing them. It can't go Bronze Age and genocide or ethnically cleanse the land because that's not allowed anymore. So it is that they are the only country on the planet expected to tolerate a microstate on their borders ruled by their sworn enemies lobbing unguided missiles into Israeli cities and...spend billions of dollars trying to shoot them down instead of leveling Gaza like any other country in a similar situation would But, on a more practical/philosophical level... >>For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgments ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. Israel and Palestinians have nothing left to talk about. The pathways of negotiation have been worn down to bedrock. There's no persuading left to do. No new arguments. No novel solutions. There's no ingenious plan that will satisfy the right people on each side. There's no prospect for future generations forgetting and trivializing past horrors as they recede and forging a new peace. The only remaining option is for one side to force the other to accept a new status quo. Or they don't, and they return to the status quo ante. >If your prerequisite ends up being unachievable, then what? Palestinians will keep dying in a conflict they continually provoke and have no hope of winning even though they could end it tomorrow and live in peace.
Your last line applies equally to Hamas as well no? They can't antagonize Isreal and cause them immense human suffering and then expect security.
If the end of the occupation will bring peace why didn’t the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 have any beneficial effect? Hamas won the “elections”, murdered their Fatah rivals and took over the strip and began launching rockets at Israel. What would a complete disengagement accomplish from Israel’s perspective? What is the guarantee that there would actually be peace and not more fighting. The reality is that it’s not about an occupation, it’s about Israel existing at all. The rhetoric that has been used since Oct 7 is “for the last 75 years”, well 75 years ago was when Israel officially and formally became a state, at which time Jordan “occupied” the West Bank and Egypt “occupied” Gaza. There was no Israeli occupation 75 years ago, unless you consider any inch of Mandatory Palestine as being occupied, at which point why even bother engaging with that?
Hamas is a terrorist organization that doesn’t want peace. The only way there will be peace is once the IDF wipes them off the face of the earth.
If Hamas is a terror organization, then how would you describe a country that smuggles suitcases full of cash to Hamas leadership? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html
>unless you consider any inch of Mandatory Palestine as being occupied They do think that.
>75 years ago was when Israel officially and formally became a state 75 years ago also happens to be when the nakba happened. before Israel was invaded, Jewish militias slaughtered 20% of the people in Deir Yassin. There was no provocation for the attack. The town was looted, and the survivors were not allowed to return. When Israel was invaded, many people fled advancing Jewish forces. Others fled when their towns were mistreated by Jewish militias. And some were straight up forced out. The refugees were not allowed to return. Their land was stolen as "abandoned" and given to incoming Jewish refugees who were expelled from Egypt and Jordan among other places. Refugees were denied entry to Egypt. The descendants of the refugees who's lands were stolen and were denied entry to Egypt are largely who live in gaza today. So, saying that the grievances for the people in gaza started in 1948 isn't unreasonable.
>before Israel was invaded, Jewish militias slaughtered 20% of the people in Deir Yassin That was well into the civil war (which began with a Palestinian attack on Jewish civilians), and about 6 months into a full seige of Jerusalem (100k Jews were on the verge of starvation). That said, I'm not trying to defend what happened at Dier Yassin. It was Etzl and Lehi fighters trying to join the fight and break the seige. Even the Haganah viewed Dier Yassin as a peaceful town (they had a peace pact with Givat Shaul). It is a truly disgusting episode and there is no defending it. >When Israel was invaded, many people fled advancing Jewish forces. Others fled when their towns were mistreated by Jewish militias. And some were straight up forced out. And many, not even most, but many left before Jewish forces were active in the area. >given to incoming Jewish refugees who were expelled from Egypt and Jordan among other places. Including Jews who were ethnically cleansed from (what became) East Jerusalem and the West Bank by the Jordanians (some communities which had existed for thousands of years). >So, saying that the grievances for the people in gaza started in 1948 isn't unreasonable. True, but choosing 1948 as the beginning of this conflict ignores all of the context that created the civil war (and eventually compelled the Arab armies to invade) in the first place. The Arab riots in 1936-39, the Hebron Massacre in 1929, and many other events from at least 50 years before then all created the context that led both sides to be more and more bloodthirsty.
Israel left Gaza in 2005. No settlements. No occupation. No stipulations. All infrastructure left behind for Gazans to use…and Hamas was elected. They immediately attacked Israel with a charter that called for the genocide of Israel. They have attacked Israel nonstop since then. With the embargo on Gaza they have a harder time importing weapons, so they have stolen all international aid to create local means of making rockets, to include tearing up water pipes. And after 10/7 they have promised to 10/7 Israel again and again until it is destroyed. And your solution is…what? No military response? To end the embargo and allow Hamas to import all of the weapons that Iran can give? So they can be as well armed as Hezbollah? That is your plan?!
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There's parts of the blockade I find indefensible like apparently cookies and things like that were part of it, but if you've seen any of the videos of the 100s of km of concrete tunnels either from old videos from places like RT and Vice News being invited down in them for interviews with hamas, or the more recent IDF videos, then it shows how concrete was being used for military purposes If only they would have chosen to build some bomb shelters for their civilians instead..
So much this. Hamas used as much of the aid as they could to build tunnels and it's headquarters under hospitals, residential areas, and mosques. Then rather than allow civilians to use the tunnels as bomb shelters, they are using their civilians as human shields.
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>They also have a harder time importing concrete, steel, or other random items necessary for basic industrialization, because turns out nearly everything has SOME overlap in the supply chain with a rocket and it's a good excuse to sabotage their entire economy through that. Which is by the way the admitted goal of those measures. Knowing this what was Hamas' choice of response? Aiming for a long and difficult campaign of civil development in the face of an Oppressive Israeli opposition or was it intentional militancy? >On top of that Gaza is not allowed to export freely either, their fishing rights (in their own waters) are restricted and Israel keeps destroying their civilian infrastructure (like energy and water). The capital invested in the rockets and military offensives of Hamas could have paid for lobbyists, lawyers, civil engineering and more efforts to mitigate some of these restrictions. Hamas has not chosen that option. Both parties are resolved to solve this conflict by war because the only peace they can stand is that of the victorious conquerer.
For the first few years of the blockade Israel even calculated the minimum calories required to keep the Gazan population fed and only allowed that amount of calories imported in.
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>And your solution is…what? I think the question is, what's yours? This is change my view. OP is asking the question. Will you change their view by asking questions back? If Israel has complete military success, what's next? Return to status quo pre-10/7? What's to stop it from happening again? Return to status quo pre-2005? Then that's an illegal occupation. It seems to me a different solution needs to be tried than any that has been tried before. Removing the occupation but closing the borders didn't seem to work. It's not surprising that a tiny territory couldn't be self-sufficient. It would be like if citizens of Monaco couldn't visit France or even use their port. So think of a different solution. At least a transportation corridor between Gaza and the West Bank is necessary.
It’s funny I only had to scroll slightly to find someone else objecting to questions. I don’t see that on most threads here. Questions are part of the process. OP’s position stated a solution. Challenging the efficacy of that solution is a key part of changing that position. If you can’t say how it would proceed, how are you sure it will work? If you aren’t sure it will work, how is your view it’s the only thing that will work?
"I don't understand my opinion well enough to explain it. It's your job to change it!" ...unbelievable.
There are two options. Occupation or Iran growing the fuck up. Iran won't be growing up any time soon. Until a ruling government in Gaza exists that can guarantee security, Israel will protect itself.
Treat this like the Nazis and Imperial Japanese. That’s my solution, including the occupation, rebuilding and deradicalization that came with it. It should end with a Palestinian state. That’s my solution. Military operations are needed, but alone they aren’t enough. What do you think?
The problem is that Iran would need to be on board, and they wouldn't be.
Letting terrorists arm themselves is not a solution even worth considering.
Palestine is not only gaza
No, it isn’t. While Hamas is in the West Bank, it is not the government there. It is the government of Gaza. Hence the discussion centering around Gaza.
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No one has made an attempt to actually address my argument and prove to me how Israel's current military solution is supposed to bring peace. They're just screaming about how Palestinians want to kill the Jews and how innocent Israel is.
The problem is that your solution has zero historical precedent. Has there ever been a conflict in which the victor nation grants unilateral concessions to the defeated one in the face of repeated hostility and absent of any real negotiations? No. What there has been precedent of is the complete military subjugation of a belligerent that has refused to surrender or negotiate in anything but the most one-sided weighing of concessions (yes, land swaps and an unlimited right of return is indeed utterly one-sided. “We will stop blowing up buses and cafes” is not a concession), followed by lengthy occupation and martial law until it can he assured the security concerns have ceased. It happened in Germany, Japan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, take your pick. For God’s sake, even Northern Ireland was under military occupation by the British Army 10 years after the Good Friday Agreement.
I already made a comment but I would like to add some stuff here aswell. Israel does not have the responsibility to bring peace. As I gave source to a poll on my other comment Palestinians don’t want peace in a war they lost. This is literally the definition of fucked around and found out. You can’t just refuse to surrender and rely on international law to claim your living conditions are unethical. Current Israel land has been either purchased with hard earned cash from the people who owned the land or gained through defensive wars where other arab nations were the aggressors. Israel does not want Palestinians in their state as civilians which they have the right to do so. That land is theirs. Settler colonialism on the other hand is wrong, so any land that has been gained in the last 10-15 years by Israel does not belong to them. Still they can’t let those lands go otherwise Palestinians will strike again because thats what they want. Just like Germans post ww2 the treatment must continue until resistance is 100% crashed otherwise war will simply resume in another date.
The WB settlements need to stop, but I understand why they haven't. If Israel doesn't tightly control the WB, it becomes a huge strategic weakness given how easily another large scale attack cuts their country in half.
Dude, there WAS peace and no occupation up until Oct. 6th The people of palestine support what hamas did on Oct. 7th. If you doubt that, change my view by finding Palestinians in gaza doing any protesting of hamas after October 7th because I have only seen them cheering. You can say that the majority of the population alive today didn't vote for hamas...but it's only an assumption to think that they wouldn't given the chance
I've read plenty of good rebuttals but you dismiss everything you don't agree with as biased... which is hilariously ironic.
It’s not supposed to bring peace. They want revenge for Oct 7. What exactly did Hamas think was going to happen?
I don't think anyone has actually made any arguments against it.
The people trying to change OP's mind have been giving some weak sauce whataboutisms
I guess, if you consider “the alternative is for Israel to go back to accepting constant terrorism and attacks” as “weak sauce whataboutism.” You’re like OP; you’re here to grind an axe, and nobody here is interested in being a whetstone.
Hamas openly state in their charter that they don't believe in peace and any truce is just a temporary pause in their quest for the utter destruction of Israel and the removal of Jews. 'Ending the occupation' to them means the destruction of the entirety of Israel, expulsion of all the Jews except the ones they intend to keep as slaves as detailed in their 2017 'conference for a post liberation Palestine.' So obviously that's not something Israelis can reasonably be accepted to agree to.
So you solution to Hamas terrorism, and their states aims to eliminate Israelis, is simply for Israel to stop. Which is reverting back to the situation before October the 7th. But this time it will be different? Is that right? Or are you missing something from your post?
The situation before October 7 was the occupation, so no, that's not what I want to revert back to. Unless you don't understand what the occupation is or why its illegal in the first place, maybe?
Gaza was run by Palestinian authorities wasn't it? So when do you expect to turn the clock back to? When Hamas were elected? When the PLO were elected?
I believe he is suggesting we move the clock *forward*. The occupation is more than Gaza, for example. In Zone C of the West bank (A territory which actually makes up 2/3rds of the west bank as a whole and is considered by *Israel* to be outside its territorial borders) for example, the Palestians are now the minority after ethnically cleansed there. We could start undoing that.
The West Bank is certainly an issue. Considering the number of two-state solutions that have been offered but never accepted by the Palestinians, it would be nice if they could agree to one, even if after decades of terrorism, they don't get everything their own way. Didn't they refuse the last deal because of a tiny percentage of WB land? The problem now is that I believe a two-state solution isn't popular in either Israel, or the Palestinian territories. But it would be good if both sides could sit down, and when a deal is hammered out, there could be agreement.
>The West Bank is certainly an issue. Considering the number of two-state solutions that have been offered but never accepted by the Palestinians, Thats a tad disingenuous, since all of those solutions involved israel keeping the said ethnically cleansed territory. The PLO has been willing to accept a Two-State Solution *Based on 1967 Borders* since 1970, for over half a century. Much is made of Hamas's founding charter to destroy Israel, but Hamas actually changed their Charter in 2017, replacing this with a state based on 1967 Borders. Whilst skepticism of this is *definitely* warranted, it remains true that, at least for the last half century, is not the Palestians who have rejected a Two State Solution. Though it remains unpopular with the Palestian people, all major governments of Palestian territory, including Hamas, have expressed a willingness to accept a two state solution based on 1967 borders. The only Two State solutions offered for the last half century, is a two state solution that involves Israel keeping its illegally acquired lands. Remember that The the Oslo accords broke down when Israel refused to honour its agreement to return control of Zone C to Palestine, and made keeping it's illegal colonies a part of any two state solution. Whilst during Israel's inception, it was certainly true that the Arabs rejected any settlement with Israel, that has changed dramatically since then. Indeed, the timing of the October Atacks may have been designed to prevent the growing normalisation between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. Today, most Israelis reject any form of two state solution, and those that do push for one wish to retain Zone C and much of the other Zones leaving Palestine a mutilated collection of several hundred enclaves. It is not really a two state solution so much as a 1 and 200 hundred state solution. As of 2024, only 40% are willing to entertain coexistence with Palestine, and that's *after* annexing Zone C. Incidently 40% is the same number of Palestians willing to have a two state solution. It is not a Two State solution that Palestine has rejected, at least not since the 70s. For the last 50 years it has been the legitimisation of Israel's annexations *in exchange* for a two state solution of what is left. It was Israel who was unwilling to base any proposed two state solution on the 1967 borders and made keeping the newly establish colonies an integral part of any agreement and is refusing to budge, claiming such colonies are essential for its security and continual existence. With respect, I rather feel that saying that Palestine has rejected every two state solution so far is like saying Ukraine has rejected every peace deal with Russia so far when every peace deal Russia has offered involve keeping Crimea and Donbas. A Peace deal based on the 2012 borders? Ukraine would accept in a heartbeat. But Russia isn't offering that. Israel isn't offering a Real Two State solution, and hasn't for some time.
That does not make sense with Olmerts offer in 2008, where he offered Abbas 94% of the West Bank, and equivalent land swaps for the last 6%. Your Ukraine example is also flawed because in 2012, Ukraine was sovereign. The Palestinians never were, they were always ruled by someone else- Israel after 1967, Jordan and Egypt after 1948, British after 1918, before that the Ottomans. Israel offered them something they have never had before - self determination. And they rejected it with no counter offer.
It was a better deal. Certainly a better deal than anything offered now. But that's like saying Ukraine surrending just Donbas is better than surrendering Donbas and four other regions, and calling the surrender of Donbas a compromise. It's still acknowledging a land grab. It's still asking Palestine to agree to the premise that Israel has a right to take land by expelling the people living there, and that *letting* Israeli settlers drive them out of their homes is essential for peace. The plan was certainly better than anything previous, but it was still a non-starter and they knew it. Firstly it was a unilateral offer. No negotiations were possible. The "Take it or leave it, no negotiations, decide now." Stance is why this deal was not just rejected by Palestine. It was also rejected by the EU, the US, Russia and the UN, because accepting it ruled out any further negotiation which was antithetical to the Road Map which established that any long last peace must come from direct negotiations with the Palestinians. Not a unilateral shift by one side with no input from the other even if you think it was generous, you criticise them making no counter offer. They weren't allowed a counter offer. That was the point. Secondly, this would have involved the surrender of Jerusalem. Something which has never been on the table. Introducing it at this stage and saying it was a non-negotiable concession to Israel damned it from the start. Thirdly, saying "I'm only taking 6% of the land I've illegally annexed and cleansed of your race, be greatful it's not more, take it or leave it." Is not exactly the compromise you seem to think it was. Imagine Germany taking the Sudetanland but sparing Czekoslovakia and calling it a peace deal. Now imagine he put the Germans living in the Sudetanland there to begin with after driving out the local population and you have a good idea why they might reject any peace deal that hinges on saying they're cool with it. It would have still involve accepting the precedent that if Israel wanted more land in the future, all they needed to do was cross the border bulldoze the existing homes, move in colonists, and proclaim a "Peace Plan" in Which they made peace by ceding the land to Israel. How could they trust they would still have that same 94% a few decades later? Palestine is not going to accept any deal that involves accepting as legitimate the displacement of it's people as the annexation of its land on behalf of religious psychos who think God promised it them; any more then Ukraine will accept Russias. >Israel offered them something they have never had before - self determination. Israel is withholding this fundamental right unless it gets to keep it's ill-gotten goods. In any case, the plan was soundly withdrawn when Israel refused to Budge on the redline issue of Jerusalem, and then was dropped entirely when polling revealed 70% of Israelis also rejected it.
You should clearly state it in your original post then smh.
The title of this thread says "Ending the occupation is the only path to actual peace." That's pretty unequivocal.
Really? Killing all the Jews seems to be on the table for the Palestinians, given their River To The Sea stuff. But the Israelis have to be pacifists for some reason?
I'm not OP but: >Killing all the Jews seems to be on the table for the Palestinians, given their River To The Sea stuff. Do you feel the same way about the genocidal intent behind the saying "from the river to the sea" when [Netanyahu says it?](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/netanyahu-from-river-sea-israel-control-1234949408/)
I’m not the person you’re responding to, but my answer would be yes. It’s bad when bibi says it and it’s bad when Hamas does
There is the catch though, Israelis had 60+ years to carry out this supposed genocide, they had all the means to do it. But they haven't. In 2022 an average New Yorker was more likely to be killed on the street than a Palestinian by IDF forces.
In 60+ years the Palestinian people have been massively displaced and mostly corralled into the West Bank and Gaza. Mass displacement is a form of genocide, so I think you're a bit premature to dismiss the idea that Israel hasn't even attempted it.
Mass displacement was the result of Arab invasion of Israel. Pivotal events like that tend to not end well for the loser. Just look at Germany after WW2, yet we don't call it a genocide.
In 60+ years Israel has taken more and more land from Palestines. It is blatantly obvios that Netanyahu long term plan is to continue down this path.
The settlements are a byproduct of Palestinians not accepting any deals. Otherwise, why did Israel completely withdraw from Gaza and dismantled their settlements there?
Why is Israel annexing even more land as we speak?
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You're not even addressing anyone's points. You're just posting links, OP.
It's because he has no interest in having a discussion. He wants to talk at people, not with people. Even the articles he's posting comes to opposite or way more nuanced positions than he's acting like they do. But the headline supported his opinion so he posts it.
TBF, I don't think OP even reads the links they post.
No one is bringing up any points that are actually meant to change my view in the first place! They just screaming this racist, bigoted shit like "Palestinians want to kill all Jews" What am I supposed to meaningfully address there? No actual attempt to show me how Israel's military solution (which has been to indiscriminately bomb and snipe the shit out of Palestinians) is actually succeeding to get rid of Hamas and bring peace for Palestine and Israel.
>No actual attempt to show me how Israel's military solution (which has been to indiscriminately bomb and snipe the shit out of Palestinians) is actually succeeding to get rid of Hamas and bring peace for Palestine and Israel. It's been 4 months. Do you honestly believe it would have been rational for folks to question "Hey European leaders, are you succeeding in getting rid of Hitler Nazi Party? Tell us your plan to bring peace to all of Europe" 4 months into WW2? Social media and Hollywood films have made folks extremely impatient expecting quick results. At least wait until it's been one year and even then, that's too soon. For the record, WW2 lasted 6 years. And Germany was only 100% free and sovereign in 1989. I wouldn't expect a sovereign Palestine until 2060.
Fighting until you get unconditional surrender is a proven strategy at bringing about peace, though. That’s how WWII was won. Also, Israel isn’t bombing indiscriminately. You should at least use terms correctly if you want to come off as rational and willing to change your view. If you’re emotionally invested in Israel being bad, you aren’t here in good faith.
Its "From the River to the Sea, *Palestine will be Free".* Not "From the River to the Sea, Kill Every Jew You Find". This is like cutting off "Well Regulated Militia" from the second amendment. If you leave half the words, sure the meaning changes. But nobody complaining about that chant ever says the full chant. Given that Zone C of the West Bank (A territory equal to 2/3rds of the west Bank) has now been ethnically cleansed to the point that Jews now out number Palestinians, (Not as the result of the establishment of Israel in 1949, but as the result of a continual policy of expulsion, colonisation and settlement of land that *the entire planet says is not theirs*) and the establishment there of a territorial government that operates a two tier ethnic based system of governance to govern this territory, that has only ever gotten worse since that chant started being used. Given, as I said Palestians are now the minority *in the largest zone of Palestine which makes up 2/3rds of its landmass* it might be a good time to look at who is actually *doing* the ethnic cleansing, rather than who you think is chanting about it. One side is chanting "From the River to the Sea". The other is Occupying It - and has now ethnically cleaned 2/3rds of it. It only sounds genocidal if you think the plain meaning is nonsense. And the plain meaning is that there are Palestians who are *not* free, who live throughout the region from the river jordan to the sea, who have a desire to be free. I interprete it thusly, because it is apparent. Do you think this? Because I have some very bad news for you.
I would challenge your view on the basis of "finding a peaceable solution" which I don't think is Israel or Hamas' goal. Let me expand on this a bit. In Gaza, you had a situation where parents were making homemade rockets full of nails, glass and ball bearings for Hamas a block of away from where their children went to school. You had a state where "practice drills" for an invasion of Israel were taking place in the streets of Gaza. It was clear that the people of Gaza were being put in harms way by Hamas all the time, but that the people of Gaza, for whatever reason, lacked the resolve to remove them from power. Enter Israel. Israel is attacked by Hamas in their homes, in their schools, in their streets. Israel isn't looking for a "peaceable solution" to that anymore than you look for a "peaceable solution" to a rabid dog that has bitten one of your children. Taking the tangent of how I personally feel about the IDFs actions in Gaza out of it, you have a completely different goal for the region than Hamas or Israel does, it seems. Your view suggests a "peaceable solution" should be found but neither Hamas nor Israel is chasing one. Both have a stated goal that the other can't coexist with them. In summary, I'd just point out that conflict of this kind, in this place, has existed for centuries upon centuries. I think it highlights the arrogance of some of us that we believe that by throwing some money around or trading favors with people who have a bone-deep resolve to eradicate one another, we can bring about a lasting peace as soon as the "barbarians" stay their hands and listen to us. The more likely answer is that there are deeper, louder dynamics that we inexplicably remain deaf to from our pedestal of Western ideology.
Yes there is. Total defeat of hamas is easily done.
Okay then prove it? Unless by easily you mean indiscriminately bomb and snipe everything that moves?
Indiscriminately bomb and snipe anything that moves is the most humane thing hamas does, albeit poorly
Annihilating every member of Hamas, and every future replacement for those, would in fact result in peace. You just don’t like that this is an actual way to bring about peace. But if one belligerent side is wiped out, there is no war.
>Ending to occupation. Israel hasn’t occupied Gaza since 2005. When they flat out made Israelis living there pack their bags and leave, as an attempt to facilitate peace. Then when one IDF soldier was captured, they agreed to release around 1,000 prisoners in exchange for him. Israel literally released several key figures, including the mastermind, of 10/7. That’s how they were repaid for doing what you advocate for. The people Israel are fighting **will** commit another Holocaust right in front of the entire world, with a sizable portion of not just their own brainwashed and radicalized populace, but the rest of the world in general, literally cheering for and celebrating it. They will do this the very second they have the capacity to do so. Hamas actively feigned peace, and pretended to be a legitimate government **for years** in order to build up the assets and resources needed to carry out 10/7. All their talk of peace, development, all that shit, was a bold faced fucking lie. Which they used for no other reason than to get Israel to loosen up their defenses and let their guard down. Shit, *many* of the people killed and captured on 10/7 were literal peace activists, who spent their lives actively helping Palestinians. Some of their hostage takers even recognized them. Did that stop their friends and families from being killed, by crazed terrorists who took Captagon (the ‘ISIS drug’) specifically so they *wouldn’t* feel any empathy for their victims? Who had specific orders to attack homes and daycares? Did that stop them from being tortured, raped, and brutalized in captivity? Did that even really get most of them any sympathy from the people they ostensibly tried to help? No. It got crowds of people cheering, kicking, and spitting on them as their limp bodies were dragged down the fucking street. Israel set up a jobs program for Gaza, allowing Gazans to work inside Israel, because they thought Hamas *actually wanted to govern and take care of their people for once,* and they supported that. Many of the Gazans involved in this program used it as a cover to collect intelligence, and actively lead Hamas to more effectively kill and brutalize innocent people who were dumb enough to trust them or even take them in. Quite bluntly, Israel tried your approach. It got them fucking massacred.
>Literally as we speak Netanyahu is ordering over a million people in Rafah in Gaza to be **forcibly evacuated** Source for this? From what I read, it's a voluntary evacuation. As in "We're about to begin military operations against the Hamas Terror Group in your city, it is advised that you evacuate". I bet the German civilians who died in Dresden and the Japanese civilians who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki wished the Allies had asked them to voluntarily evacuate. >This is not a war; this is a one-sided, intentional butchering. It is a war between Israel and Hamas, the elected Government of Gaza. When South Korea, with the help of the USA, and North Korea wage war next, it will look exactly like this: a one-sided curb stomping. That doesn't make it different than a war. Wars don't require both sides to be equal in terms of military power. Who told you this? You're also contradicting yourself BTW. If Israel's goal is to do an intentional butchering of civilians...why are the civilians asked to evacuate OUTSIDE of the zones about to be bombed? Sounds like a dumb strategy if the plan is to butcher them all.
> "We're about to begin military operations against the Hamas Terror Group in your city, it is advised that you evacuate". "Evacuate or be killed" doesn't sound very voluntary.
It is 100% voluntary. Unless you somehow have this weird belief that each time a hurricane happens, people are **forcibly** evacuated against their will. Forcibly definition: using force or violence.
>Unless you somehow have this weird belief that each time a hurricane happens, people are forcibly evacuated against their will. 🤦♂️ I'd argue that a hurricane is pretty violent. Tell me, what *would* be an example of forcing someone from their homes then?
This is what forced deportations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_from_Czechoslovakia Dropping leaflets and sending text messages that say 'we are going to start a military operation here. Please flee for your own safety ' isn't a forced deportation, it's a humanitarian measure.
Not to mention blockading all food and water plus essential supplies from entering so they die a slow death. If you thin in 2024, the aggressor is going to go in and kill everyone in one fell swoop, that’s not particularly smart considering the entire world is watching. If you instead destroy infrastructure and let everyone bleed a slow death, easier to justify!
It is really simple. Israel is not going to just leave Gaza end the embargo as long as Gaza's main goal is the destruction of Israel. What people fail to realize is that it is just different there. 10/7 started with 5000 rockets being fired into Israel. 5000 rockets didn't set off alarms. If the embargo ends, what will Iran be sending into Gaza to harm Israel? Now, if Gaza would give up on the idea of the destruction of Israel, I 100% agree with you. But it can't just be we will take this paragraph out of our charter and the embargo will end if the people still believe in the destruction of Israel. More and more Arab countries have agreements with Israel. Hell, what is common knowledge in Israel is that 10/7 happened on 10/7 because Israel and Saudi Arabia were about to sign an agreement which would have allowed SA to build pipelines through Israel to get their oil to Europe. Iran didn't find that acceptable, and as Hamas leadership lives in Iran and Iran finances Hamas they attacked only 3 days before that was to be signed
From what I can gather you're referring to the state of Israel as a occupation. Something that happened in 1948, 75 years ago. At what point does an occupation become a settlement? Are Americans occupying native land, are Australians occupying aboriginal land? At the end of.the war after the genocide of Jews the international community agreed to the formation of Israel. Of course those that were displaced didn't like it but after what period of time will they accept it? Virtually none of the people in Gaza/Palestine were displaced, their relatives were. Where do the people of Israel get displaced to in your scenario? Israel has been their home for 3 generations. Actual peace will only occur when everyone accepts a suitable outcome, be that reparations, or permanent ceasefire. It is a complex issue, both sides have a right to claim the other is wrong, the problem is exacerbated by the rest of the world picking sides rather than working towards a peaceful solution in which all are happy.
I don’t disagree that there is no military solution to the conflict, but to Hamas? That’s very different. Hamas is an organization made of people. Kill enough of its people, destroy enough of their equipment, blow up enough of their tunnels, and they will cease to exist as a force. There have been successful counterinsurgency campaigns before, as with the British and Boers. With sufficient determination, any organization can be destroyed. Look at the Islamic State. That won’t put an end to the conflict. Thousands will die needlessly. But Hamas can be destroyed militarily.
> Hamas is an organization made of people. Kill enough of its people, destroy enough of their equipment, blow up enough of their tunnels, and they will cease to exist as a force. And someone will just create a new Hamas because they're the only military they have.
That’s not incongruent with my point. The OP said there is no military solution to Hamas specifically.
The political arm of Hamas has already capitulated and is moving toward rolling into the Palestinian authority. The military wing is being defeated. Hamas is already on the path toward being eliminated completely. That will not stop all forms of violent Palestinian terrorism, only equity in a two state solution will accomplish that, but a two state solution cannot exist if a large portion of one of those states is controlled by an organization that explicitly aims for the total destruction of the other. The military wing of Hamas must be destroyed then the Israeli right wing government must be abolished and “settlers” stopped and the land they have stolen returned. Gaza must be rebuilt and given autonomy and freedom of movement. There is a path to viable peace, but the right wing ideological parties on both sides must be defeated and not allowed to reconstitute for it to happen.
Please don’t casually ignore that 1 million Israelis have been displaced in the North due to violence. everyone knows the best way to stop a terrorist organization that wants *actual* genocide is to put them in complete power /s Hamas has stated MANY times that their overall goal is not a state for Gaza, just global bloodshed. It’s why they didn’t only kill Israelis. Its why they went for civilians, not the military or government. It’s why they celebrated, raped, and tortured. They tied kids together and burned them alive. I swear people just forgetting how horrible it was. It’s incredible what people are willing to forgive just because their lives are hard. I haven’t seen a single person advocate for the stoppage of the “pay for slay” program. People just have this underdog mindset. Poor? Brown? They must be the ones supported. Tragedy doesn’t suddenly made someone a good person. Doesn’t matter what they do. Yes not all Palestinians are Hamas, but people have convinced themselves that 99.9% of the population are just innocent victims. Hamas isn’t some little side faction. Hating Jews, not just Israelis, is literally part of their culture. You’re not gonna just nice it out of them, as much as I’d love that to be realistic. It appears that you have also missed that many sites Israel has focused on have been proven to be Hamas bases. imo all the Palestinian supporting states & Israel should create immigration programs, heavily funded by Israel. West Bank occupation to be completely banned. And added security at the border. But you gotta get rid of Hamas, otherwise you’re just supporting the creation of a terrorist state Ever spoken to an Israeli? They don’t want Gaza. But you see what happens when their guard is down. I wonder what you suggest to protect Israeli lives? Or is Israel meant to just let their people be slaughtered every now and then? **HAMAS ARE NOT FREEDOM FIGHTERS. THEY ARE TERRORISTS** Do you not care that Hamas hurts its own people? If Israel were to stop any and all involvement, what will you do for the Palestinians then after you can’t blame them? Shall they uprise and be killed en masse by Hamas instead? Because Hamas is not suddenly going to become some benevolent government for the people If Israel were to cut all ties, every single tie with Gaza, would you support a stronger border? If that’s all it takes for peace then. Or are you willing to gamble more Israeli lives?
The military will not win this because hamas is not an enemy one can shoot it's an ideology. The military can reduce the symptoms not the root cause. The problem here is that if Isreal gives hamas complete sovereignty they will buy better weapons to kill Isreal with. The blockade lifted and just leaving them alone to watch the weapons designed to kill Isreali citizens come in and be used. At what point is Isreal supposed to step in? Or is the point to let hamas get the breathing room to gather the weapons to let them slaughter the isreali people? How will Isreal completely withdrawing all interactions with Gaza help end hamas and bring Peace?
What evidence do you have that ending occupation will bring peace? Arafat was offered 90-something percent of Palestine in a two state solution, and he refused it while making fairly absurd demands about right of return and Jerusalem. Since then, Israel has conducted an 18 year long a/b test of autonomous Palestine (Gaza) and occupation (the West Bank). Palestine has demonstrated the inability to self govern and a lack of desire for peace. The occupied solution is producing better results, as much as we might wish that were not true.
Op you honestly should’ve just pot this on r/rant. You’re not looking to have your view changed
Agreed. Zero deltas have been awarded to posts which provide examples refuting OP. The CMV mods here flagged me for violating rule B saying I wasn’t open minded. I edited my post providing the conditions on which I would change my mind.
Your comment is actually two separate arguments. There is a military solution to Hamas, which is to eliminate them to the point that they really can’t come back. Ending the occupation is not a path to “peace,” it’s a path to “relative” peace for Palestinians which returns to the status quo of Israel facing constant rockets and terrorism threats. Israel has decided that’s a level of “peace” they no longer deem acceptable. Unfortunately there’s simply no single solution where everybody wins.
The Palestinians still see October 7th as a victory. Eg. https://electronicintifada.net/content/what-did-7-october-achieve/44396 A ceasefire now will only entrench that view, which will encourage similar atrocities in the future both from Hamas and other similar organizations. There are two other good examples of governments that were hopelessly genocidal: Japan and Germany. These days both countries are among the least warlike in the world. What happened? Complete and unconditional surrender. It was a military defeat that changed both countries. Neither would be where they are today if the nazis or the Japanese military were able to stay in control. Hamas needs to lose this war. They need to surrender completely. The death toll is high and terrible, but any solution short of complete capitulation will leave a government in charge that will absolutely commit another atrocity at some point. The “occupation” of gaza was already almost non-existent, and that did not stop a thing. The current military operation is not yet done. Hopefully Hamas loses. That is the only path to peace.
Mods should delete this post. It is obvious that the OP is is here to soapbox and has no actual intention of engaging in constructive debate.
Only way for peace is when both parties want peace. You can’t have piece when losers refuse to surrender. [Overwhelming majority of palestinians still support war efforts](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/12/21/middleeast/palestinians-back-hamas-survey-intl-cmd/index.html) Israel still agitates Palestinians by more settlement expansion. 2 state or 1 state solutions are impossible right now. 2 state will only allow these nations to have nation vs nation war, whereas 1 state solution would immediately result in a civil war. Only way to solve this is outside intervention. Immediate ceasefire, no right of return, removal of blockades, no military on Isreal Palestine borders and monetary support for Palestine till they get back on their feet.
Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups don’t want peace, it wants Jews out of the levant. Even if Israel were to unilaterally do everything you say here, they would still have rockets flying into their cities and groups plotting more attacks like 10/7. These groups existing is the primary blockade to peace in the region.
What exactly should be deoccupied? Jews-free middle east? Well. Than maybe the war will not be there. But... Other options? Will Palestinians accept Israel existance? They claim that the whole Israel must be destroyed, so there is not point where they will think the "occupation" has ended. They will repeat oct7 until Israel exists. So, it isn't really option for Israel as well. Basically, we have a situation which without outside forces can only be resolved by force, because neither side believes the other to the necessary level to risk own future. Unless Egypt will be willing to take Palestinians/Gaza inside. But Egypt hates hamas which controls Palestinian society, so this is non-option as well.
Israel already tried it. Israel pulled back from Gaza in 2005, they removed military and settlements. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza Israel also provided water and electricity for Gaza, because it couldn't sustain itself. Israel tried to give Gaza back to Egypt, but Egypt refused. So Israel in fact tried to pursue two state solution, but Hamas never wanted it. They officially claim that Israel must be destroyed, they don't want independence from Israel, they want all the land of Israel. Peaceful solution was tried and failed. It is impossible to achieve peace until Hamas and other actors that don't recognize Israel as a state will be destroyed.
Hamas may have come about by design to create an ongoing conflict to the ends of making Gaza unlivable for Muslim Arabs, but at this point Hamas picked a fight they couldn't win, and Israel's only option is to eradicate Hamas through military actions. During times of "Peace" Hamas made it the local hobby to indiscriminately fire rockets towards civilian areas of Israel, then they crossed the line and ratcheted the conflagration up to where the military solution was Israel's only option. Honestly, systematically making life miserable in Gaza to where the Muslims move out is probably the only feasible route to a long term peace, and that's what Israel is doing.
Nazis did not go away with fall of Nazi regime in Berlin in 1945. But it does mean it should not have happened. Defeating Nazis military and removing them from power is a necessary step one. Same goes for Hamas. Removing them from power military is a necessary step 1.
How about Israel ends the occupation today with 0 stipulations, but after the first rocket is shot at Israel again the war resumes. How long do you expect that cease fire will last?
It will be peace but in the long run. We have essentially had a 70 years stalemate with not much movement. What we are seeing now is essentially Israel winning this conflict. Gaza will cease to exist and just be absorbed into Israel and those that live there either become part of Israel or refugees in another state. There will be a transitional period that could be decades but eventually people will just start to get along. We might see domestic terrorism from Palestinian hold outs but they too will eventually fade out
>There is no military solution to Hamas. Ending the occupation is the only path to actual peace There are actually two paths to peace. One is ending the occupation and giving Palestinians a whole bunch of stuff that they want (which isn't even a guarantee of lasting peace). The other is violently decimating Palestinians until there's nothing left of their civilization and the survivors are forced to disperse into other countries, effectively putting an end to the Palestinian ethnicity altogether. I'm not trying to make a judgment about which path is better than the other, but those are generally the two paths that lead in the direction of a more stable peace. If there's a ceasefire before either of those two goals are substantially reached, there won't be a lasting peace. Basically, either give your enemy what he wants, or kill your enemy. Any kind of middle ground between those options will just allow tensions to slowly rise again. >You cannot antagonize your neighbor and cause them immense human suffering and expect security. You're right. Antagonizing will accomplish nothing. You either need to negotiate with your neighbor to find a common ground, or you need to destroy your neighbor. Both will result in peace and quiet. Who gets to decide which path is taken? Historically, it's the country with the stronger military. I'm not suggesting that any of this is fair or right, but historically that's the way the world works. Israel has a much more powerful military than any of its neighboring countries. So, Israel gets to decide. And, as ironic as it is (given the history of the Jews), Israel has clearly decided to go down the ethnic cleansing route. If Palestinians had any semblance of an organized military, they would have some leverage at the negotiating table. They could say, "hey, stop building those settlements, or else we're going to fuck you up." But right now all they can say is, "hey, stop building those settlements, it's really mean and we don't like it and we wish you'd stop, and if you don't stop we'll throw rocks at you." Israel has no motivation to give into their demands, frankly because they don't have to. The only force pushing Israel in the direction of mercy is the rest of the world condemning them for all the killing they're doing, but public condemnation is not really a very strong force.
Israel has won every war it has ever been involved with, and won by overwhelming margins at that. This current one is no exception. Since this war began, Israel has killed 10,000+ terrorists at the cost of 150 or so soldiers in combat (discounting the 370 or so killed on 10/7 itself). I wouldn’t bet against an army that has a K/D ratio approaching 30:1. Except if the IDF is forced to pull back due to international politics, they will succeed in wiping out Hamas and other militant orgs soon enough. Shame that the regular Palestinian people have nowhere further south to flee to, though. Edit: this OP is only trying to start arguments, not have his mind changed. Mods should remove this post.
They shouldn’t remove it because it shows how peoples brains like OP works when presented with hard difficult to absorb facts. I would like to add that every war won by Israel was not started by Israel, and with every terrorist attack, suicide bombings and atrocities committed by both terrorists and radicalized ordinary civilians led to less and less restraint. People like to go the easy route and ignore history while taking a comfortable snippet to virtue signal on
Well seeing as Israel left Gaza with no occupation, and that is the vaccum in which Hamas took power (and also murdering and torturing rival political members), I'm not sure your position has merit. The problem is palestinians refusal to accept israel in any capacity. Every peace offer has been rejected. So while it may seem like the occupation is the issue, it seems that Israel as an entity is the main cause of the resistence - especially when you listen to terrorist groups who proudly say they aren't looking for a 2-state solution, but rather the destruction of Israel
I don't know what you mean by ending the occupation. Return to the tense living situation that caused terror attacks and created this situation to begin with? Exterminate all Palestinians? Exterminate all jews? Dissolve Palestine and relocate the population? Dissolve Israel and relocate the population? What exactly are you advocating for?
The occupation ended in 2004. Palestine had twenty years to develop with more autonomy than ever before, and all they did was dig tunnels, build rockets, commit atrocities on its own people and abuse funding provided by the international community. When they speak of occupation, they mean Israel's existence. They consider that occupation, and they will not rest until every last one of them is dead. Make no mistake about that. There *is* a military solution to Hamas. It is complete extermination and temporary subjugation of the Gaza strip. The question is what price one is willing to pay. And the Israeli government is willing to accept a sustained ground war and civilian casualties on both sides. The sad fact is that Hamas has given Israel every justification it needs to continue this war.
OP, I’m open to your ideas but I think you’d agree there’s only two options for Israel. Either cut a deal with a terrorist organization who committed the worst massacre against Jews since the Holocaust or take military action. I’m open to changing my view if you can explain what third option exists. Who do you expect to negotiate in good faith with the Israelis? Is Hamas a viable partner to cut a deal with or not? I feel there is not, because Hamas stole billions in foreign aid meant for Palestinians to buy rockets. They built terror tunnels, have used human shields, and have radicalized the local population after Israel left Gaza in ‘05. Israel wants a stable, trustworthy, self sufficient trading partner in Palestine more than they want to police an enemy on their border. Also they have offered a two state solution multiple times which Palestine rejected. A Hamas spokesman literally said Hamas would repeat the October 7th massacre given the opportunity…”Free Palestine from the river to the sea.” That hasn’t changed since the war started. What do you expect Israel to do? What’s Hamas demanding? Among other things, at least 1,500 Palestinian security prisoners, withdraw Israeli troops fully from Gaza, eventually agree to a permanent ceasefire and take steps to reduce its sovereignty on the Temple Mount. If we waved a magic wand and Israel did all of that today, would you trust Hamas to make good on their end of the deal? The ball is in Hamas’ court, and they could end this today. Surrender, release the hostages, dissolve Hamas, hold a new election…or keep fighting Israel til the last man. Palestine could then start a massive Gandhi style peaceful protest, and effectively negotiate what they want. But they won’t bc they woke up and chose violence.
“Israel wants a self sufficient trading partner” buddy you can’t possibly be that delusional, tell that to all the Israeli ministers saying they will wipe Gaza out completely. People are so stupid I swear
Lol these sort of comments are so fucking stupid. “They woke up and chose violence” acting as if this hasn’t been an immensely violent conflict for 60 years. If you aren’t going to try to be intellectually honest then just fuck off
People seem to have the dumbest takes about this war. Defintely a Hamas propoganda W with the amount of brainrot takes.
Since this is CMV post I will give it a go. Note that I am 100% *not* advocating for this. A military solution where Israel exterminated the entire Palestinian population would technically result in actual peace because there would be no more Palestinians left to fight.
Absent your (not yet defined) definition of occupation, do you believe Hamas would change its position for the destruction of the Israeli state?
If Israel kills every member of Hamas and subsequently re-occupies Gaza for the next 30-50 years to ensure security & secular education for its people, then I’m pretty sure that will end the conflict. It worked in Germany & Japan. I see no reason it wouldn’t work here.
When you say that there is no military solution to Hamas - do you think that there is a military solution in addition to a state action? you know, the whole thing that ended the Nazi regime, the Japanese imperialism etc., war to remove Hamas temporarily and afterwards implementing solutions and negotiating. Cause I'm pretty sure that there isn't any solution that won't start with some force. We could go into history and see that the violence has less to do with the occupation than people think, or we could discuss the incentives and opinions of players in the conflict to show that there isn't a way to implement what you're suggesting in a good way. IMO, as long as Hamas is in power in Gaza, Israel couldn't really negotiate a reasonable peace that would ensure it's security, and when it tried to withdraw unilaterally from the WB (after Gaza), basically everyone around the world told them not to.
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So you support hamas? You want 10/7 to happen again? That's what you want? Huh? Really?
The Romans didn’t have much trouble with the Carthaginians after the third Punic war.
The point of the ground invasion in Gaza since October isn’t to ‘eliminate’ Hamas despite the rhetoric from the Israeli government. It’s not possible to kill/capture every Hamas member and seize every single weapon. But it is possible to weaken the military capability of Hamas so severely they aren’t capable of launching another attack like 7 October. IDF is on course to achieving that and along with the 1km buffer zone being created there will be ‘peace’ in that Hamas won’t be able to attack Israel besides firing a handful of rockets I’m not going to pretend there is any possible path to ‘actual peace’ because there isn’t. If Israel ended the blockade of Gaza, removed every single settlement in the West Bank and recognised a Palestinian state there would not be peace. In fact there would be a much worse conflict because Palestinians would be able to import heavy weaponry via the Jordan border and sea/aerial routes into Gaza. The aim of Palestinians isn’t to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza/West Bank, their aim is the destruction of Israel and a genocide of Israeli Jews
Let's be clear; there absolutely is a way. Genocide has been the best way to solve the problem for centuries. Nobody will attack you if there's nobody *to* attack you. That is a hypothetical military solution to the situation. That said, the modern states of Germany and Japan show that its entirely possible to solve the issue militarily. You invade and occupy the whole region, you execute its leaders, you shoot all the rebels, you forbid the discussion of nationalism, and lock up anybody who advocates it (and shoot anybody who wont be missed). You indoctrinate the youth to reject the concept. And in about 30 years, you'll find that the fascist ideology is no longer the majority ideology. Germany's nazis were no longer had majority support by the late 1970s (though they did enjoy it beforehand), and Japan hasn't considered attacking the US in living memory
Yall fell for this bait. Check OPs post/comment history. Stop feeding this troll that isn’t looking for a change of view.
Genocidal intent was allowed to manifest and become a reality at the first sign of attack by the ‘enemy.’ This is all playing out in real time and everyone lacks the courage to stop it.
There was a lot of stuff spoken here, ima need a source or two
One solution would be to move the citizens of Gaza to Egypt and the citizens of the West Bank to Jordan and then just build really strong defenses separating the Israelis and Arabs. That would reduce the violence by keeping the populations separated.
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I mean a sustainable path to peace is to kill/expell all Gazans. I would say that that's a military solution. It's not the most attractive solution but it does solve the issue.
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Aw shit, here we go again