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Yeah, it's a good deal.
War is heavily negative sum which is why both sides usually lose. Unless victory is assured, it almost always makes sense to stop fighting rather than to pursue maximal war aims.
This is a particularly bad war. Neither side is able to win. Israel can't defeat all its enemies because whenever enemy deaths get too high, Israel loses the support of Europe and the US. And of course the Iran/Palestine coalition can't win either due to ineptness.
So without a negotiated peace, the war would just go on and on forever with Israel killing lots of its enemies but never enough to achieve victory.
Is it perfect? Is it permanent? No, of course not. But it is net positive.
I think a permanent peace, even if it means being a temporary pariah state works better. The constant cycle of terrorism->Israel bombs the shit out of Gaza/West Bank -> temporary truce while militants rearm and reorganize -> terrorism -> repeat cycle serves no one. It’s not even really peace. Peace would mean that Israel could more or less stand down, and not need to put in all the apartheid regime stuff that it does because Palestinians are no longer a potential threat. Palestine could rebuild itself and either become part of a federated state within Israel or a small state perhaps in West Bank that would not be bombed every 5-10 years.
This is where Western interference is causing the problem. Because the Hamas/Fatah movements are never completely defeated, they simply call for ceasefire, and in some future time it starts again. Probably with better weapons and with the lessons learned from this round.
The majority of people who matter in the west don't see this as a problem because they don't want the conflict to end with an Israeli victory. We saw this for instance when the pushes for a ceasefire in Lebanon started really picking up steam (driven by people like Macron) at the exact point it was clear how effectively the IDF was dismantling Hezbollah.
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If they become a pariah state they lose their peace with Jordan and Egypt, so that doesn't help.
Jordan and Egypt at war with Israel is a massive loss for those 2 countries. The inertia of peace keeps them from rattling the sabres to sate domestic bloodlust. Being in a belligerent state makes obvious the precarity of their domestic military and economic capabilities, exposing the regime to internal threats that are much more willing and capable of stringing the existing leaders up from lampposts. Its better for Sisi and Hussein to shrug their shoulders and say 'the US is forcing this peace on us' than to actually mobilize and expose how weak they really are.
Once Israel is a 'pariah state', 'the US is forcing this peace on us' is no longer usable.
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This situation will only get worse due to demographics. Makes it hard to see postponing the war as a good thing.
Not totally sure what you mean by “get worse” here; you mean both sides will only continue to experience more and more casualties in future, because of their above-replacement TFR resulting in net positive population growth?
American and Western public opinion of Israel will get worse due to a growing Muslim population and an anti-racist younger generation.
And the fact that Israel is costing a ton of money, genoiciding christians and filling Europe with migrants. We have 250 000 Syrians in Sweden and now the country has been taken over by jihadists with fancy foreign weapons who got air support.
Israel is not genociding anybody, but the behaviors which are worst are aimed at Muslims. Israel soft-supported the Maronites in the Lebanese civil war and Israeli Christians are a model minority.
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Israel didn’t force Sweden to let in Syrians though. That’s a self own.
The just push migrants to Europe while helping them cross the Mediterranean while their NGOs are the biggest lobbying groups for mass immigration.
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Doctors and engineers are a valued commodity, so the trick is to redefine every military aged male who declared their intent to be an aspiring rapper. From aspiring rapper to charity case thinking about turning his life around, this refugee will surely accrue positive value for Sweden in n=ERROR years.
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Even the white and right leaning younger people in the west aren't as fond of Israel since they are either more isolationist or further right are more ethnonationalist and so oppose helping non-whites.
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It was a bad war, but what other choice did Israel have? Not retaliating or trying to get the hostages would have been politically untenable. Immediately entering negotiations for the return of the hostages would have had the effect of legitimizing hostage taking as a means of diplomacy. the only real option was to invade and hope that Hamas kept the hostages alive for leverage and wait until Hamas was sufficiently weakened to be in a position to make a deal. And that's just a deal, not necessarily a good deal.
Other choice? Accept the deal and do a prisoner exchange in return for the hostages. No war, no ICC prosecutions, no IDF members committing suicide due to the depravity of their actions, Israelis would be able to travel/holiday without worrying about getting convicted for crimes against humanity/genocide, no Hezbollah rocket campaign destroying their economy, no Houthi rocket campaign making their ports go bankrupt...
Israel refused to take the hostages back multiple times because they preferred to go in and wipe out Gaza in order to try and ethnically cleanse and then settle the territory. Itamar Ben Gvir said multiple times that he had made sure to sink any deal involving the hostages being returned, and there's a decent chance that Smotrich resigns from government because getting the hostages back isn't worth not being able to murder more Palestinians and steal their territory.
Enemy kills 1200 people and takes 200 hostages?
Just make peace with them in exchange for getting the 200 back.
It's the perfect solution!
This statement becomes a lot less pithy when you factor in the actual history of the region. I may as well talk about how Israel brutally and evilly attacked Palestine for no reason on October 8 - you can make either side look good by arbitrarily choosing the moment at which you start counting the trading of blows.
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My headcanon about this is that there's a secret agreement between Bibi and the Don about how the Israelis can play nice until they get their people back (or whatever's left of them), and immediately following that they have America's blessing to glass gaza entirely.
Obviously not going to happen.
More likely they play nice until Hamas's sudden but inevitable betrayal.
You forgot "utterly unexpectable".
It's a Firefly reference.
What does that even mean?
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Well that went over my head.
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Israel was engaging in acts of war against Palestine. They bombed Gaza before october 7th, they had killed hundreds of Palestinians earlier in 2023, they were engaging in an illegal blockade and stealing land.
I again remind you that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2004, evicting Israeli settlers from the strip. Then the gazans elect Hamas and start bombing Israel, after which Israel blockades Gaza. A blockade is completely reasonable in response to such an act of war from the gazans.
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Your beliefs seem to be:
That Israel should have taken no action after October 7 accept to comply with Hamas's demands for the return of the hostages.
That Israel wants to kill or remove all 2 million people from Gaza and settle the area themselves.
Would this be accurate?
My personal belief is that Israel should adopt a single-state solution with full democracy and franchise for everyone within the borders of Israel and Palestine. As for number 1... yes, I would prefer if they negotiated a return of the hostages. It might seem like a bit of a weak response if you hatched out of an egg on October 6th and have no prior knowledge of the region, but Israel has done far more and far worse to the Palestinians in the past. It would have been better to bury the hatchet and sue for peace on October 6th, but... well, 2 is accurate. I don't think there's any real arguments against this claim given that it is the official position of many members of the Israeli government. Not only do they want to do this, they have sunk multiple deals to return the hostages in order to keep the violence and ethnic cleansing going.
I like this, but only as a Christian state. The best outcome would be for the conversion of all involved parties to Christianity and the removal of others from the holy lands.
The failure of all parties involved to acknowledge the 1099 borders, under which Jerusalem clearly belongs to the Holy See, has brought untold death and destruction on the region for centuries.
/s
Yes, I'd also be happy to see the region returned to Rome.
Roma Imperiale, not Melonis rump. There are better things to do with thet.
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And the Palestinians would promptly elect a government that at least attempts to do far worse to the Israelis than the Israelis are doing or have done to Palestinians.
In a federated system, I’m not sure how much it matters. If three states in the southwest USA voted for the Nazi party, the entire government doesn’t go along with it.
Honestly, I think something like the American Indian reservation system might work. A disarmed population with reasonable control of its own territory might be a decent option.
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Maybe the ADL can explain to its home country that such conspiracies are racist and that social media companies should ban people who spread such hate.
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I don't believe that would be the case if there was a legitimate, good-faith effort to bring the two populations together and live in peace. It'd be a complicated process that required a lot of time and effort, as well as participation from the international community - you would of course have to have protections against retributive genocide. It wouldn't be easy or free of complications, but I think it'd be much better than the current apartheid situation.
This is incongruent with the population of Gaza being given political power. Even if Israel for the last 50 years had engaged in solely defensive actions, accepted mass bombings as a thing that happens, and never did any counterstrikes, the Arab Palestinians would still try to genocide them.
How exactly do you know this? Do you have access to some kind of magical or scientific device that lets you understand people so well that you can definitively state how they would act in an alternative reality that's extremely different to our own? I personally don't think that the jews are such awful people that living near them for fifty years with no problems or violence would make people want to exterminate them. That said, you've left a few things out - would there still be an apartheid state? Would there still be settlements on Palestinian land? What exactly do you mean by "solely defensive actions"?
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But why would Israel take that deal? You want one side (the stronger side) to just give the other side everything it wants, and in fact, to do so after an incident in which thousands of its citizens were killed, tortured, and raped in the most horrific ways possible.
This would be true Christlike turning of the other cheek from Israel.
But in the real world, that never works. To fail to defend yourself only invites contempt and more aggression, which applies as much in international politics as it does on the school play yard. If Israel did what you said, they would inevitably lose their country. And I would say they deserved it. Nothing is so contemptible as a person who doesn't defend their rights.
Turn the other cheek when there is a promise of heavenly rewards. In real life continued cooperation in the face of defection just makes you a chump ripe for the taking.
The Palestinians have played the game right. Continued defection when cooperation is externally imposed by greater powers, promising violence in arabic and pleading innocence in english, lying to internal stakeholders to keep momentum going.
There are plenty of well meaning Israelis who believed that defense is itself an aggressive proposition, that opening their homes and businesses to Gazans would foster cooperation and love. Those people set up open air festivals and farming villages next to Gaza to facilitate such endeavors. For their efforts they were slaughtered and raped on livestream, to the cheering delight of the very Gazans they tried to help.
Let's grant their strategy has worked. What I'm then curious about is: why wouldn't it have been better to go even farther? Take whatever deal Clinton was trying to organize and then defect later from a stronger position?
The ones who signed the treaty are not the ones who wield the knife to stab the Israelis in the back later. Arafat signing the Camp David accords would have seen him deposed in an internal Fatah struggle, much less any Hamas action later on. Hamas signs the ceasefire now because all the other Gaza militants are similarly degraded, leaving Hamas relatively strong.
Also, they are pretty stupid. My characterization of 'playing the game right' is more a reflection of their maximalist strategy having unexpected payoffs, not that they received their expected payoffs. The expected Hamas payoff for launching the Oct 7 attack was to prove the IDF incapable and spark a regional war that would crush Israel in a tidal wave of West Bank and Hezbollah militants, or failing that to sit back and eat a campaign of retaliatory airstrikes that leave Hamas intact underground. That payoff did not happen, but the new allies of Hamas - western activists cosplaying as revolutionaries to attack proximate enemies - were happy to take up the Hamas cause for themselves, giving a payoff where one failed earlier. Even if there were no actual payoffs, Hamas and its supporters are perfectly capable of scribbling in their own reality to their internal stakeholders who are themselves predisposed towards conspiracism and matyrdom.
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To save the lives of the hostages. They've given up and lost far more than they would have if they simply accepted the first deal that was offered to them - this is a worse outcome from any perspective other than "we need to wipe out the Palestinians for more lebensraum", and even that's debatable. Look at the big list of negative consequences from my earlier post and remember that none of this would happen if Israel just took the first deal.
Actually, in the real world, when you ethnically cleanse undesirable populations for having the wrong religion you engender disgust and hatred in the majority of the rest of the world. Germany would have been better off if they simply gave the Jews the ability to vote and lived together with them - but they took your suggested course of action instead, and now Nazi Germany has been consigned to the dustbin of history. We're already seeing Israeli war criminals fleeing to Argentina to escape prosecution, but it is an open question as to whether or not history finishes the rhyme.
Ah yes, this is why Azerbaijan is having so much trouble selling their oil, considering their behavior towards Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh.
And why the world NGO-cracy condemned any attempts to help the Hutu genocidaire refugees in Congo, considering how they kept going after any Tutsis they could get their hands on.
It also explains why Turkey's continued repression of the Kurds got them kicked out of NATO, and why there's massive protests on every college campus about the genocidal atrocities being committed by the Sudanese Arabs towards the Christian and animist black Africans of South Sudan.
/sarcasm.
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The Jews of Germany were not trying to kill every ethnic German they could get their hands on.
And the Palestinians released some of the hostages with no conditions, so they're not trying to kill every ethnic Israeli they get their hands on. Absolutes make for poor arguments.
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None. Revenge was the best option, IMO.
Sometimes the least bad outcome is the best one, and I think that's what Israel settled for. They have acted rationally throughout this conflict, IMO.
Agreed. I think this war becomes a lot easier to understand when you take the frame that there are no good guys, and this is just the latest iteration of same 3000+ year old conflict that has infested Judea since Old Testament times.
I don't see any peaceful resolution that will be permanent, and in the final calculus, I'd prefer the genocidal IDF to a genocidal Hamas.
The only difference is that the Jews finally managed to organize into a cohesive unit as opposed to a billion squabbling factions and their enemies have somehow gotten even stupider than they were in the past. The only smart thing Israels enemies did was cut loose the most worthless dead weight. Jordan and Egypt both refusing to return to the 1966 borders where West Bank and Gaza were not under Israeli occupation is the singular political masterstroke that has made all their military defeats worth it.
Indeed. Pan-Arabism was well towards dying at that point, but it's hard to find a better case of screwing over one's co-ethnic co-religionists for the sake of national interest.
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