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Well, let me amend that to “reasonable westerner” then. Those all seem like terrible reasons. Especially 2, which I keep hearing also repeated from the Israeli left, seems to not understand that Arabs are a finite resource.
We’re at about 2% of Gazans dead, and 4.5% wounded to incapacitation. At some point they’re going to run out of able-bodied men. Might take a few years, but that’s still preferable to another October 7th.
This would work if there were 7 million Israelis and maybe 4 million Arabs. But there are about 450 million in the Arab world. Many of them do not particularly like Israel. The 7 million Israelis are not even internally united.
How many people do you have the ability to kill before the flow of Western weapons and support runs out?
There are less than 2 million Arabs in Gaza. I don’t imagine we could take on the entire Arab world, and happy that we don’t have to.
Good question. The alternatives are cruder bombs with more collateral damage though, which I don’t imagine is a more palatable option for limp hearted westerners.
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Machiavelli would tell you that you'll need to eliminate all the male children as well or else they'll grow up and seek vengeance.
Which Israel can't do. So the reluctance there at least makes sense.
The fatal problem with the radicalization thesis imo is that it's all well and good for America, but not everyone can go home and stop radicalizing people.
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That’s one benefit of stretching the war, then - they’ll grow up to a killable age!
More seriously though, if their society collapsed they’d likely have to move somewhere else anyway. In my fever dreams I hope Trump is elected and disbands UNRWA somehow, and then those refugees might even integrate in their host countries. That being unlikely, I’ll accept them just being further away and thus less likely to cause damage.
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