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the human terrain does act rationally, historically, when smalltime warlords make contact with the empire. fight and everyone dies, or submit and live. "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." and the palestinians are not the neutral melians.
if they're astute enough to make moves for the reasons you suggest that's worse, they have no excuse to not know they have no realpolitik win condition. they kill a few jews and get bombed in response, some win. their dream scenario of a land push victory that kills a lot of jews ends with every nuke israel has and 100 million dead arabs.
the greater their intelligence as actors then the necessarily more irrationally-driven-by-jew-hate. you can't beat israel. if as a people they were actually smart they'd start cutting their sleeping leaders' throats. but they don't. supposing israel has some hand in supplying and motivating their own quasi-insurgency is also farcical, i see no reason to doubt israel would take final peace without further bloodshed, and i am left, especially if they possess the faculties you give them, with seeing people of such hate they would rather murder jews than live in a functioning state.
blowback risks? nah. the cause of blowback isn't brutality, it's not enough brutality. there's not a 21st century solution to peace in the middle east. it could be decades, but israel is eventually going to stop listening to outside complaining and start responding to terrorism with wildly disproportionate force. when their neighbors know a single guy sneaking into a house will result in a dozen sorties per dead kid and there isn't a power in the world who can get israel to stop, then there will be peace.
right, the point: pleading for israel to stop almost assuredly causes more deaths, not less.
Why are all your previous posts properly capitalized and this one written in ironic all-lowercase? I find this such an annoying way of typing that I couldn't even read your post all the way through.
idiosyncrasy
I've actually grown tired of it, but I've been dealing with some monster writer's block lately and was hoping the "looser" nocaps would help get the ball rolling again.
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There is a realpolitik solution though, which is to redraw borders and separate IL and PA into two contiguous viable states. Even if this will not assuage Palestinian seething, a clear international border would be a lot easier for IL to defend and a lot harder for PA to violate than the current situation where IL is the warden and PA is the inmate in a cramped open-air prison but for the sake of appearances they have to pretend it is not quite so, and also IL wants to seize half of PA's cell to extend his break room. The problem with this solution was that it would probably entail some territorial concessions from IL, and also shut down their real agenda which is to gradually seize any remaining worthwhile PA-held land and squeeze them out or provoke them into self-destructing. This is a hard sell as long as IL knows that it enjoys unconditional support from the Western world when push comes to shove, and in that light the PA strategy of provoking IL into visible atrocities now seems as good as any (as it seems like one of the moves that have better chance to compromise the unconditional support).
Toothless "pleading" for IL to stop might indeed just result in continuation of the status quo and many more violent deaths over the next century (but taken to its extreme, this argument might just as well be fielded for something like "fine, I guess we can let them literally genocide all that is left of PA, it's clear that we can't stop it anyway and the sooner they all die the fewer future people will be born to cause more deaths"), but "pleading" that is backed with "...or we may lose our next election to Ilhan Omar/the AfD/??? and then you will truly be on your own" may bring about the two-state solution.
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