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Can you explain more about how this possibility would proceed? All explanations I've seen involve an implicit step consisting of "and then the Palestinians decide to stop hating Israel with such passionate intensity that they'll sacrifice their own wellbeing to harm Israel and Israelis" and I genuinely don't understand, mechanically, how that step is supposed to be achieved.
My more-or-less-unconditional support for Israel in this conflict is rooted in the seeming impossibility of durably appeasing the Palestinians at any reasonable cost.
Time. You need time, preferably decades with no huge triggers on either side. You need the family and friends of those killed on both sides to have their emotions less raw and possibly to die off, then with fewer direct immediate victims of violence you might be able to move forward.
Notably for this you would need moderate leadership on both sides, who can slowly push for slight de-escalation, year by year. It can't be immediate, they would be killed or replaced. Probably propped up and supported by external actors. Then in 20 years or 30 you won't have peace, but you'll have a simmering conflict with many fewer victims. Hopefully you'll also have seen economic improvements and wealthier, safer people are more likely to agree to peace.
In other words it kind of looks like what happened before October 7th, where there would be mostly ineffectual rocket attacks, it just would have needed a Hamas leadership who weren't plotting October 7th and a Israeli leadership that were reining in the various settlers slowly. Both sides need someone who is willing to be just unpopular enough to dial down the heat, but not unpopular enough to get assassinated or deposed.
The US supporting both sides contingent on violence not being too excessive and putting pressure on both to come to the table, over and over and over again for the next 20 years.
Sure, if you can wish into place a Palestinian leadership who would not attempt to butcher Israelis for 20 or 30 years, then the plan could work.
But you can't! Hamas is here. They aren't going quietly. And they aren't some exogenous force. By all accounts I've seen, Palestinians support Hamas, and Palestinians supported the October 7 attacks. A plan that relies on an unachievable counterfactual isn't a plan.
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Time has not diminished the Jewish desire for Zionism. If we are to give credit to the Palestinians, they seem equally determined. Would you give them two thousand years to get over it?
To paraphrase the Kingdom of Heaven, as Saladin speaks to Balian: 'Jerusalem is nothing and everything!'
They don't have to get over their desire, many Catholics in NI still want Northern Ireland to become part of the Republic. But being willing to fight and die for something when you are comfortable and treated well and none of your immediate family have been killed, is a very different proposition.
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A large segment of the Palestinian population is irrationally motivated by hate and intergenerational grievances, and their leadership has always been corrupt. I don't believe peace would ever be "easy" or smooth. That said, it's also simplistic to think they are literally all irredeemable vengeance-monsters. Any peace process will necessarily have to be a long term and painful one - the current generation isn't going to suddenly stop wanting to kill Israelis, but there have been efforts by some Palestinians to change things. It will only work in a staged way where the next generation has things better and is less inclined to become martys.
Sometimes these efforts are undermined by their own people (the conflict between Fatah and Hamas is complicated, and not entirely Israel's fault but Israel isn't innocent of responsibility either), and sometimes very deliberately undermined by Israel. If the Israelis take your attitude: "We'll have peace only if and when every last Palestinian renounces violence and accepts the status quo, and until then, we'll keep bombing," no, there will never be peace. At the moment, that does seem to be Israeli policy.
Just to cite one example where I do blame the Israelis, the West Bank settlements are literally the "settler colonialist project" that gets thrown at them a lot. It's explicitly a project to displace Palestinians and fuck them over. Gaza is a hellhole and probably can't be anything else in the foreseeable future, but the West Bank could be the start of an actual Palestinian state with cooperation between them and Israel, but Netanyahu has (IMO) intentionally made the West Bank a sore spot and another conflict front.
Israel's current attitude is "We have the power, so suck it." I can't say I blame them (especially after October 7) but I also can't say I blame Palestinians for hating them. A "peace process" would have to start with the Israelis acknowledging the Palestinians have legitimate grievances instead of just saying "This is 100% all your fault." Clearly they are not going to do that. So here we are.
The details of the Oslo process and why it failed, the Camp David accords, Clinton's peace efforts (whatever else you believe about Bill Clinton, he made a genuine effort with Israel and Palestine) are very complicated. The popular narrative right now is "It was all undermined by Arafat," and honestly, I'd say that's only about 60% true.
Who gets the other 40% of the blame, if you don't mind me asking?
Mostly the Israelis, but also other Palestinian factions (notably Hamas).
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Wait, why not? If Israel decided to ignore optics, accept whatever level of collateral damage as was necessary, and bombed every Palestinian that didn't renounce violence, and only bombed them, then Israel would stop when only the non-irredeemable non-vengeance-monsters were left, and there'd be no more violence, yes?
I mean, given the current state of Palestinian culture, this would be at least genocide in the wholescale and eradication of their culture, and would probably end up being genocide in terms of actual real genocide, yes, but that would stop the violence.
Sure, but that would effectively be pretty close to actual genocide. I don't think Israel is literally committing genocide right now, but I think what they've decided is acceptable collateral damage is on the far end of "looking kind of like war crimes." Whether or not you agree, it is for certain that Israel at this time (and for a long time even before October 7) does not believe and does not care that peace will ever be on the table.
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Because they aren't willing to kill them all, whether that is due to morality or the fact their allies would not allow it. So given they are not willing to do that, and given history shows that even if most of the population accepts peace, there will always be hold outs, then demanding 100% peacefulness is an impossibility.
That is the problem here, if you aren't willing to kill them all, and you also are not willing to accept 95% peace, then you are stuck in the current situation for the foreseeable future. You can get to 100% peace by genocide yes, but that is already off the table.
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There have been countless national hatreds that have cooled down, at least to a manageable level, quite fast after a peace has been achieved. I've never understood the contention that Palestinians would be such a special case that this is unimaginable.
The Palestinians aren't just the Palestinians they're the - increasingly tenuous - foothold on Jerusalem for the entire Ummah (and a symbol of Muslim humiliation that has to be addressed)
This is why they have outsized support, and all sorts of special benefits that other refugees don't get and are seen as an ongoing moral issue for the entire Muslim world, even if many leaders have bent to the facts on the ground (and American bribes).
A lot of groups don't have this sort of situation to embolden their radicals who want the whole thing.
EDIT: While we're at it, there is the question of what separate and distinct Palestinian identity (separate from being Arab) exists outside of the conflict with Israel.
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One of the more "hopeful" things I've seen is videos of Hamas fighters beating and shooting Gazans. Which is horrible. But it implies that Gazan support for Hamas might not be as great as we out here think. From a certain point of view, asking Gazans whether they support Hamas and hate Israel is like asking people in Soviet Russia whether they support the Communist Party and hate capitalism. We know that journalists in Gaza had to toe the Hamas party line; that surely applies to residents as well. We have no idea how much is informed belief, how much is brainwashing, and how much is an outright lie to avoid being killed by their own government.
It's probably too much to hope that Gazans don't hate Israel by this point, but maybe if Hamas is fatally weakened (somehow), and then if Israel stops killing so many of them, then maybe enough Gazans would choose to try something different in the future. I wouldn't bet on this happening, but it doesn't seem as impossible as most paths to peace. (Or at least, most paths that don't involve genocide or ethnic cleansing.)
On what grounds do the Gazans hate Hamas? If it's a twenty Stalins sort of thing where they hate Hamas because Hamas hasn't been able to kill enough Jews, that a kind of hate still doesn't leave much room for hope.
Abstractly, there are plenty of grounds for Gazans to hate Hamas.
In practice, there are quotes from exceptionally brave dissidents, and people who have escaped. That's only a small number of people, though, and it's hard to tell how representative they are. Which is why the videos are useful, because they demonstrate that Hamas is being brutal toward Gazans, and in general I'd expect that type of brutality to make Gazans hate Hamas more than in a counterfactual world where Hamas treated Gazans better.
"They're being brutal towards us instead of the Jews" isn't hopeful either.
The problem is that "Gazans don't like Hamas" doesn't mean "Gazans would be peaceful without Hamas".
I have a bit of hope, which I don't expect most other people to share, because I think these sorts of events can snap people out of their otherwise-fixed mindsets. It can be shocking to find out that people you believed and trusted turn out to be lying monsters, and likewise when people that you hated and feared turn out to be completely normal.
It's kinda why I'm here.
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