"What they tell pollsters and what they actually want/believe are often two different things
How you can be so convinced that all the Palestinian people are genocidal maniacs with a 2,500-year-old "hate-on" for the Jews"
I'm not sure how many support it, and neither do you. The polls are all over the place on this.
"and simultaneously imagine that they'd lie on an exit poll about wanting peace with Israel is a total mystery to me. Why would they lie? For whom??"
If it's anonymous poll, no, they probably wouldn't. If they're being asked by someone else, yeah, they might lie to make themselves look good. Because no one wants to look like a genocidal maniac when you're facing another person or even in a crowd. Do *you* know how these polls are conducted? I don't.
"Are you surprised that they support the people willing to strike back at those who did the killing?" I sure am, when Hamassholes are using them as human shields, taking foreign aid meant to feed and care for them and using it to build rockets and tunnels. Yeah, when they support a party expressly clear on how a Jewless river to sea means kill all the Jews. Yeah, when they said they wanted Hamas to broker a solution when they first elected them and then it didn't happen and then they cheered on Oct 7 and now they're supposedly going to vote for Hamas again, although I don't know if there will be another option. But they had one before and they voted for the genocidists. That's why I compared them to the Trumpers before (although I've said it about those peoples' support for the Republicans overall): No matter how much they get screwed, no matter how badly they're being bombed and slaughtered near out of existence, their grand plan is "Please Israel, may I have some more?"
"The only ray of hope, as I said, is that I think almost everybody would prefer to put their anger aside than condemn their children to more of this endless war." I wish that would happen, but I don't think it will. As Golda Meir put it, I think, "This will only end when the Palestinians love their children more than they hate us." I agree with her assessment.
"Without a two-state solution, what do you see as the alternative?" How do you see that happening when Palestinians keep rejecting it?
What's the alternative? Same-old same-old, I guess. I for one am not interested in hearing about a two-state solution until Hamas is gone and Palestinians have proven, say for 3-5 years, that they can live peacefully with Israel. Although I'm not sure Israel will ever trust them, and I'm not sure they should.
As you note, there've always been plenty of massacres. And the one going on in Gaza now is too impossible to ignore or right off as 'human shields'. Israel is pretty clearly going over the top with this. I don't know what your solution is, Steve, but I don't have one. I don't think there can be one unless both sides can agree to live with each other. There are some giant us-only buttheads in Israel, but there are, I suspect, a helluva lot more on the other side. Bill Maher put it pretty succinctly in his New Rule yesterday: This taking and settling of the land has gone on for many thousands of years, and the only people who can't move on are the Israelis & Palestinians. And these are ancient enmities that go far, far behind the creation of Israel or even the creation of Islam. These are two peoples intertwined with each other's DNA who have hated each other for a very, very long time. I mean, I understand why everyone hated the Israelites in the Old Testament - they were major assholes to their neighbours.
No one has a solution to this, Steve. No one anywhere. I suspect it will end when one side or the other actually succeeds in wiping out the other. Or maybe not, I don't know. No one does. But for the far-seeable future I expect a lot more wholesale murder, brutality, death and destruction on both sides.
There are two problems with any hope of this conflict winding down.
1) The Palestinians are part of an honor-driven society whose treatment has been light-years past what any such culture can simply "move on" from. The young man who carried the headless corpse of his mother out of the rubble of their house is going to grow up to a life dedicated to vengeance, and it would take at least a generation, perhaps two, after Israel withdrew from what remains of Palestine before the memories faded and the old guard died off.
2) I don't know if you have any Israeli friends, but I do, and back in the days of psytrance raves I had a lot more, a lot of the musicians were Israeli. And my best friend from high school married and converted and took the obligatory pilgrimage.
And while the Palis are an honor-driven society, much of Israel is full of itself to a degree that would make Father Coughlin and Heinrich Himmler get sick. They truly believe themselves to be the Master Race, quite different from American rural racism, which is more based on the accurate appraisal of their own inferiority.
Three Israeli hostages are shot and the country is aflame with outrage where the murder of what is now probably 10,000 children didn't raise an eyebrow.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh-huh, "they're not all like that." I know that. But the peaceful non-butcherous Israelis aren't running the government, the settlers are, and I don't know how familiar you are with the settlers when I heard one on NPR I had to pull over and calm down. They are utterly vile people. Compared to "Jewish" settlers (most have been unobservant for generations), the Palestinians are saints.
Of course, all this is falling on deaf ears because some 𝑾𝑶𝑴𝒀𝑵 were raped and tortured, likely by people who buried their own children, killed by Israelis for sport.
Hamas should have bombed some settlements, and not raped anyone. Things would be very different right now, as getting the settlers on camera would shatter Israel's self-righteous "self defense" and "right to exist" rationales.
"What they tell pollsters and what they actually want/believe are often two different things
How you can be so convinced that all the Palestinian people are genocidal maniacs with a 2,500-year-old "hate-on" for the Jews"
I'm not sure how many support it, and neither do you. The polls are all over the place on this.
"and simultaneously imagine that they'd lie on an exit poll about wanting peace with Israel is a total mystery to me. Why would they lie? For whom??"
If it's anonymous poll, no, they probably wouldn't. If they're being asked by someone else, yeah, they might lie to make themselves look good. Because no one wants to look like a genocidal maniac when you're facing another person or even in a crowd. Do *you* know how these polls are conducted? I don't.
"Are you surprised that they support the people willing to strike back at those who did the killing?" I sure am, when Hamassholes are using them as human shields, taking foreign aid meant to feed and care for them and using it to build rockets and tunnels. Yeah, when they support a party expressly clear on how a Jewless river to sea means kill all the Jews. Yeah, when they said they wanted Hamas to broker a solution when they first elected them and then it didn't happen and then they cheered on Oct 7 and now they're supposedly going to vote for Hamas again, although I don't know if there will be another option. But they had one before and they voted for the genocidists. That's why I compared them to the Trumpers before (although I've said it about those peoples' support for the Republicans overall): No matter how much they get screwed, no matter how badly they're being bombed and slaughtered near out of existence, their grand plan is "Please Israel, may I have some more?"
"The only ray of hope, as I said, is that I think almost everybody would prefer to put their anger aside than condemn their children to more of this endless war." I wish that would happen, but I don't think it will. As Golda Meir put it, I think, "This will only end when the Palestinians love their children more than they hate us." I agree with her assessment.
"Without a two-state solution, what do you see as the alternative?" How do you see that happening when Palestinians keep rejecting it?
What's the alternative? Same-old same-old, I guess. I for one am not interested in hearing about a two-state solution until Hamas is gone and Palestinians have proven, say for 3-5 years, that they can live peacefully with Israel. Although I'm not sure Israel will ever trust them, and I'm not sure they should.
As you note, there've always been plenty of massacres. And the one going on in Gaza now is too impossible to ignore or right off as 'human shields'. Israel is pretty clearly going over the top with this. I don't know what your solution is, Steve, but I don't have one. I don't think there can be one unless both sides can agree to live with each other. There are some giant us-only buttheads in Israel, but there are, I suspect, a helluva lot more on the other side. Bill Maher put it pretty succinctly in his New Rule yesterday: This taking and settling of the land has gone on for many thousands of years, and the only people who can't move on are the Israelis & Palestinians. And these are ancient enmities that go far, far behind the creation of Israel or even the creation of Islam. These are two peoples intertwined with each other's DNA who have hated each other for a very, very long time. I mean, I understand why everyone hated the Israelites in the Old Testament - they were major assholes to their neighbours.
No one has a solution to this, Steve. No one anywhere. I suspect it will end when one side or the other actually succeeds in wiping out the other. Or maybe not, I don't know. No one does. But for the far-seeable future I expect a lot more wholesale murder, brutality, death and destruction on both sides.
There are two problems with any hope of this conflict winding down.
1) The Palestinians are part of an honor-driven society whose treatment has been light-years past what any such culture can simply "move on" from. The young man who carried the headless corpse of his mother out of the rubble of their house is going to grow up to a life dedicated to vengeance, and it would take at least a generation, perhaps two, after Israel withdrew from what remains of Palestine before the memories faded and the old guard died off.
2) I don't know if you have any Israeli friends, but I do, and back in the days of psytrance raves I had a lot more, a lot of the musicians were Israeli. And my best friend from high school married and converted and took the obligatory pilgrimage.
And while the Palis are an honor-driven society, much of Israel is full of itself to a degree that would make Father Coughlin and Heinrich Himmler get sick. They truly believe themselves to be the Master Race, quite different from American rural racism, which is more based on the accurate appraisal of their own inferiority.
Three Israeli hostages are shot and the country is aflame with outrage where the murder of what is now probably 10,000 children didn't raise an eyebrow.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh-huh, "they're not all like that." I know that. But the peaceful non-butcherous Israelis aren't running the government, the settlers are, and I don't know how familiar you are with the settlers when I heard one on NPR I had to pull over and calm down. They are utterly vile people. Compared to "Jewish" settlers (most have been unobservant for generations), the Palestinians are saints.
Of course, all this is falling on deaf ears because some 𝑾𝑶𝑴𝒀𝑵 were raped and tortured, likely by people who buried their own children, killed by Israelis for sport.
Hamas should have bombed some settlements, and not raped anyone. Things would be very different right now, as getting the settlers on camera would shatter Israel's self-righteous "self defense" and "right to exist" rationales.