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Notes -
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.
Yes, Rome not Italy.
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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"?
We know this because that is what Palestinians say they want to do and what they have attempted to do at every opportunity.
I'm sure that if you asked the jews of Auschwitz how they felt about Germans they would say and attempt to do many of the same things - is that evidence that the Jewish people are evil murderers full of hatred who need to be exterminated? It isn't terribly surprising that the man holding his son's lifeless, headless corpse won't talk positively about the people who murdered him.
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Do you hold yourself to this standard on baseless conjecture? How exactly do you know that the Palestinians will "live in peace" if they are fully integrated with a single state solution? The Gazans, who voted in the Kill all Jews Party, will just get along in Israel if they have representation? The ultraorthodox Jews who have been seizing land in the West Bank will be ok with sharing? What is your magical or scientific device that indicates Gazans will play nice, when have they ever done? What happened in other ME states, like Jordan and Lebanon, that accepted in large numbers Palestinians? What evidence do you have a one state solution would turn out well?
Israel: a nuclear armed state, with 5th generation jet fighters, top tier intelligence agencies. If you are wrong about integrating Palestinians into the Israeli state, and all current and historical evidence points to you being wrong, you will hand all of this over to the people who voted in Hamas.
The alternative world proposed above is so incredibly different from our own that I don't believe we can really draw an accurate picture of what happens in it. In the world being described there's no nakba and no system of apartheid. The Palestinians aren't just violent for no reason, they have a clear set of grievances with Israel and the USA that are extremely comprehensible, and those grievances simply do not exist in this hypothetical. The proposed world is so different from our own that I don't think it's really possible to draw meaningful conclusions from it - there's a very decent chance that 9/11 and the various US wars in the middle east also don't happen.
I believe that if you remove the causes of their grievances they will no longer be as disposed to violence. If you look back in history, there was a population of Palestinian jews who lived in the area without violence - there's actually direct historical evidence of Jewish and Arabic Palestinians living together in peace. Peaceful co-existence is possible, and a far more desirable state than what we have now.
I do not believe Israel should be a nuclear-armed state. I'm more than happy for a united, single-state Palestine/Israel to have the Mossad shut down and their nuclear weapons disarmed in the same way South Africa's were.
Well there are a bunch of European Jews there now, they understand they themselves are the grievance you describe. And there are several orders of magnitude more evidence that they all won't get along. So someone has to win, and I prefer it to be the ones who currently have nukes and F-35s. They also seem to be a lot more competent than the Gazans.
What else happened to South Africa? Something mean and competent is better to me than another shithole.
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Egypt doesnt accept gazan refugees, and has previously rejected control of the territory. I believe they would reject it again. They know that it would then be their job to keep the terrorism in check, and they seem to agree that this is a shit job where people will hate you for doing whats necessary - even without the preexisting hostility they have towards their current rulers, and with the prestige of saving your arab brothers.
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying re: Egypt, but I don't know how that's relevant to the situation at hand. Palestine would be self-governing, with no need for Egypt to do anything. That said, who knows what Egypt would be like in that world - without the US interfering to help out Israel, the counterfactual Egypt is likely very different to our one.
Palestine as is, and as was ca 1970, can not self-govern in a way that keeps the terrorism in check. If some government could do that, it would drown in international support. Egypt is strong evidence for this, because their options would be strictly more than those of a local government, and they still dont think they can do it.
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In my opinion, the polity that is non-Jewish inhabitants of that territory includes a majority of people that cannot tolerate the existence of Jews (or Christians) in their vicinity. My evidence for this is that such populations in adjacent states populated by persons similar to Islamic Palestinians have also been ethnically cleansed or genocided over the last century.
In other words, we have centuries of evidence that polities consisting of Arab Muslims are evil, and Palestinians hew closely to the norms of said polities. In fact, they often embrace them to the extreme.
OTOH Israel's response to the provocations of its neighbors has been historically judicious, particularly given their military advantages. If they wanted, there would currently be zero Palestinians in Palestine. But not only that, zero Jordanians, zero Syrians, zero Lebanese. This is similar to the US in Iraq/Afghanistan. Our error was in being too concerned with casualties, when in war they often are the point.
Casualties, and humiliation. The failure of Afghanistan for the US was in trying a consultative approach, putting in local leaders who would exercise the necessary political authority to stabilize the violent tribes while staying their hand in conducting pogroms and massacres. The peace of the Taliban was an imposed one by the rifle, just as the peace of Timur was one of the sword and the peace of Shah (can't remember which one) was imposed by the Raj. Humiliation and subjugation destroys the root of a poisonous tree, and while the soil will grow another cursed plant later on, it will have to take a new form and promises at least a generation of brittle peace as it grows.
Israels peace with Jordan, Syria and Egypt would have failed were it not for their own internal coups. Israel may not have flown the star of david over Cairo, Damascus or Amman, but their internal rebels did, and that is itself enough to incentivize peace while buying time to deal with internal struggles. Israels light touch is not what rewarded it with peace, the incompetence of its enemies is what gives Israel each of its future days.
There's little evidence that those countries will exceed Israel in competence anytime soon.
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Have you looked at the history of the region before Israel? Palestinian jews were more than capable of living in peace with Palestinian arabs, and even in the earliest stages of the conflict the Palestinian movements called those jews their brothers.
When you start talking about how entire populations are just inherently evil you have departed from reality and polite society both. You can adopt this position on the motte, but you're forever in the same category as the Nazis and the white nationalists. If you want to support ethnic cleansing and genocide, you're free to - but good luck advocating this murderous and hateful belief to the rest of the world.
I could say the same about Rome's judicious responses to the provocations of the rebellious hebrews. The Romans treated them so incredibly well, even to the point of building roads and aqueducts for them - but those ungrateful Jews just kept violently attacking them for no legitimate reason. Maybe the Jews were just inherently evil and full of hatred for Italians - after all, there were centuries of evidence proving that the Jews just kept on attacking the Romans unprovoked! If the Romans wanted, there would be zero jews living in Judea - but they were just too nice, too generous and too concerned with the casualties of their enemies. What moral titans!
Under the Ottoman rule peace was enforced via subjugation. The Muslims were content to let the Jews and Christians live so long as the Muslims remained supreme.
The Arabs are right now celebrating their victory over the Jew and promising endless Oct 7, and immediately after Oct 7 we had the NY DSA and elite universities rush to celebrate the slaughter, complete with swastika signs and giddy promises for more slaughter. You are free to castigate those supporting the moral position of an Israeli state exercising the right to defend itself, but your own moral position is shared by loathsome belligerents that would rape murder and flay you apart, in that order only if you're lucky.
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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.
Never before has an exception proven the rule quite so much.
I don't think the fact that the Palestinians released some of the hostages because those hostages were kind to the Palestinian community before being abducted is a particularly strong argument for the idea that the Palestinians are evil monsters who just want to kill all jews for no reason.
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