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AMERICA has not proven trustworthy? Gazans waited one negative second before starting the Hamas Fatah civil war, where gazans cheered gleefully as Fatah (and Hamas) members were thrown off rooftops and shot in the streets. Israel tried a Singapore On The Med model with the gilded cage for Gaza following the 2005 pullout. All that happened was the Gazans tore down the infrastructure left behind for them, deliberately impoverished themselves to demand greater aid from externals, and plotted to slaughter the few jews who sought to help them by providing employment. If Hamas rolled through and said 'we are going to Tel Aviv to execute Netanyahu' half the Israelis might have closed the highways for Hamas. Instead Hamas wanted roads paved with blood.
Gaza is Hamas, Hamas is Gaza. A good deal is them ruling over a pile of dead enemies, even as the list of enemies grows ever longer and stronger with each passing day. Left to their own devices the BEST case scenario for Gaza is authoritarian strongman rule by a western ally who had the funds and thr institutional backing to keep dissident elements in check. Left to their own devices and Gaza will implode like Yemen, with the only question being how many neighbors it tries to take out before fizzling out.
There is no just world or fairness in international relations and one's reputation matters even to scoundrels.
Anyone in the middle east, in particular in the levant, in particular in gaza, is untrustworthy.
Yet, America's ability to broker agreements still relies on how those untrustworthy actors trust it.
You may see this principle at work in Ukraine: however much the Ukrainians have indeed violated Minsk, they are still unlikely to value a Russian guarantee of security because that has been violated before.
Now if you want to use the difficulty of the situation to just carpet bomb the place and build casinos on the graves of the locals who are all terrorists anyways, that's your prerogative. But I've always been a proponent of peace, diplomacy and armed neutrality, and I'm not going to change my mind because you consider some people savages, as if that's a novelty.
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