"The framing offered from the pro-Palestinian side is that Israel is engaged in mindless retribution without end (probably ending only in genocide), and focuses on noting that Israel has already caused many more deaths in Gaza than Israelis killed Oct 7, so they should consider their revenge mission complete and go home."
"The framing offered from the pro-Palestinian side is that Israel is engaged in mindless retribution without end (probably ending only in genocide), and focuses on noting that Israel has already caused many more deaths in Gaza than Israelis killed Oct 7, so they should consider their revenge mission complete and go home."
Hmm, I don't think this is any vaguely serious person's framing. It certainly isn't my framing.
After what Hamas did, I don't think anybody expected Israel to go into Gaza, kill 1200 civilians, and call it a day. Not least because in every single conflict for decades, Israel has responded to aggression from Palestinians with a death toll tens of times greater than was inflicted on it. I think the overall ratio of Palestinian civilian to Israeli civilian deaths stands at around 17:1.
The problem was, Israel's stated goal of destroying Hamas is poorly defined, likely impossible, and very difficult to connect to the slaughter taking place in Gaza right now.
There are ~30,000 Hamas soldiers. How many of them have to be killed before Hams is "destroyed"? All of them? Okay, how will they know when they've done that? How much civilian "collateral damage" will that require? What about the Hamas leadership living outside of Gaza? What about the young men being radicalised, right now, into joining Hamas? Do all of them have to be killed too? This is what I mean by undefined. This is why, after 25,000 people have been killed, after 100+ days of near relentless bombing, Israel shows no sign of stopping and no signs of accomplishing any of its "goals."
And how do you prevent future attacks when you have given millions of people very, very good reason to hate you? We're not just talking about the bombing since October 7th here. Palestinians were attacking Israel before Hamas came along. Before the tunnels. The tunnels, and even Hamas, aren't the source of Israel's problems.
The source of the problem is two-fold:
1. Israel's violent oppression of the Palestinian people and its ongoing theft of land.
2. Anti-semitic extremists who want to kill all Jews.
Solving problem 1 is obviously entirely in Israel's hands. They could do it tomorrow. Solving problem 2 is out of Israel's hands. But I think the dangers of problem 2 are fuelled by problem 1.
Antisemitism is, of course, not a new problem. But Jews and Arabs have lived peacefully alongside each other in that region of the world for centuries. The establishment of a Jewish state in the region, a place that the Jews said, "this is OURS," not, "we will live here with everybody else," was, I think, one of the key drivers of the current problems. As I say in my conversation with Tom, David Ben-Gurion, the "founding father" of Israel, seems to agree with this assessment.
Israel's actions after that; land theft, the horrors of the Nakba (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ1TAOibLss), the oppression of the Palestinian people, only fuelled anti-Jewish sentiment. And this made it easy for the extremists to recruit people to their side.
I don't believe (and obviously my beliefs don't necessarily count for much, but I think they make sense here), that most of the 30,000 people fighting for Hamas are anti-Jewish extremists. I think they hate Israel for reasons that are frankly quite understandable. Things ike Israel killing members of their family, or stealing their parents' homes, or forcing them to live under siege.
I'm not saying that if Israel stopped doing this things, it would make the people in the region love them, but I think this is the only way to begin a peace process. You can't negotiate peace while you're standing on somebody's neck. And given that Netanyahu is never going to lift his foot off the Palestinians' necks, the first step towards a two-state solution now resides in removing him from power. To be fair, I think the vast majority of people, including Israelis, agree with that.
"The framing offered from the pro-Palestinian side is that Israel is engaged in mindless retribution without end (probably ending only in genocide), and focuses on noting that Israel has already caused many more deaths in Gaza than Israelis killed Oct 7, so they should consider their revenge mission complete and go home."
Hmm, I don't think this is any vaguely serious person's framing. It certainly isn't my framing.
After what Hamas did, I don't think anybody expected Israel to go into Gaza, kill 1200 civilians, and call it a day. Not least because in every single conflict for decades, Israel has responded to aggression from Palestinians with a death toll tens of times greater than was inflicted on it. I think the overall ratio of Palestinian civilian to Israeli civilian deaths stands at around 17:1.
The problem was, Israel's stated goal of destroying Hamas is poorly defined, likely impossible, and very difficult to connect to the slaughter taking place in Gaza right now.
There are ~30,000 Hamas soldiers. How many of them have to be killed before Hams is "destroyed"? All of them? Okay, how will they know when they've done that? How much civilian "collateral damage" will that require? What about the Hamas leadership living outside of Gaza? What about the young men being radicalised, right now, into joining Hamas? Do all of them have to be killed too? This is what I mean by undefined. This is why, after 25,000 people have been killed, after 100+ days of near relentless bombing, Israel shows no sign of stopping and no signs of accomplishing any of its "goals."
And how do you prevent future attacks when you have given millions of people very, very good reason to hate you? We're not just talking about the bombing since October 7th here. Palestinians were attacking Israel before Hamas came along. Before the tunnels. The tunnels, and even Hamas, aren't the source of Israel's problems.
The source of the problem is two-fold:
1. Israel's violent oppression of the Palestinian people and its ongoing theft of land.
2. Anti-semitic extremists who want to kill all Jews.
Solving problem 1 is obviously entirely in Israel's hands. They could do it tomorrow. Solving problem 2 is out of Israel's hands. But I think the dangers of problem 2 are fuelled by problem 1.
Antisemitism is, of course, not a new problem. But Jews and Arabs have lived peacefully alongside each other in that region of the world for centuries. The establishment of a Jewish state in the region, a place that the Jews said, "this is OURS," not, "we will live here with everybody else," was, I think, one of the key drivers of the current problems. As I say in my conversation with Tom, David Ben-Gurion, the "founding father" of Israel, seems to agree with this assessment.
Israel's actions after that; land theft, the horrors of the Nakba (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ1TAOibLss), the oppression of the Palestinian people, only fuelled anti-Jewish sentiment. And this made it easy for the extremists to recruit people to their side.
I don't believe (and obviously my beliefs don't necessarily count for much, but I think they make sense here), that most of the 30,000 people fighting for Hamas are anti-Jewish extremists. I think they hate Israel for reasons that are frankly quite understandable. Things ike Israel killing members of their family, or stealing their parents' homes, or forcing them to live under siege.
I'm not saying that if Israel stopped doing this things, it would make the people in the region love them, but I think this is the only way to begin a peace process. You can't negotiate peace while you're standing on somebody's neck. And given that Netanyahu is never going to lift his foot off the Palestinians' necks, the first step towards a two-state solution now resides in removing him from power. To be fair, I think the vast majority of people, including Israelis, agree with that.