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The upcoming Rafah offensive has had me seriously reconsider my support for Israel. At the very least Israel, as the overlord and conquerer, has an obligation to resettle and provide new accommodation for the people of Gaza when it destroys their previous homes.
Much like how it supports the Jewish settlers in the West Bank I don't see why Israel can't support a resettlement project of the Gazans into the West Bank too. It'll cost billions sure, but that's still worth it if Israel annexes Gaza once it's done with its operation. Instead we don't really have any good plan for what will happen to the civilian Gazans after Israel razes their entire land to get at Hamas.
Israel has obligations towards the Palestinians, all the more so because it's destroying their lives at the moment. First moving them south so you can destroy North Gaza and then moving them north so you can destroy South Gaza is not meeting them.
The minimal obligation expected of an aid recipient is 'don't waste it'. International aid, such little as it may be, has consistently been:
No reconstruction plan can exist if the recipients actively reject such efforts, and prior events (Jordanian Black September, Kuwaiti ) shows that accommodations provided even by erstwhile allies is not appreciated, and limiting charity takes a backseat to expelling hostiles.
With the Palestinian population consistently displaying underappreciation, if not active hostility, towards aid providing entities, what recourse is there for Israel? Israel offered to return Gaza to Egypt and West Bank to Jordan, and both declined. Why must Israel bear the burden of enduring the incessant attacks of a hostile population, much less actively support said population.
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Hamas is at war with the different set of terrorists running the West Bank, too.
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They will allow international aid bodies, the EU, UN, the US in to build temporary housing and provide aid, then the Gulf Arab states will throw them a few billion because of their propaganda war with Iran on the issue, then slowly Gaza will be rebuilt. And in a few years Hamas (or some other Islamist organization) will again take control as soon as the first semblance of democracy is returned, and all the while the rocket attacks on Israel will continue.
This whole thing is pointless. The only permanent outcome (for Jews and Arabs) in this approach is exile or death. The Arabs lack the weaponry to kill or force the Jews into exile, at least for now. The Jews are hamstrung by their political relationships and by regional politics such that neither option is viable in treatment of the Arabs. If the Hamas attack had been repelled without large-scale Israeli hostage taking, without the Kibbutz massacres and without what happened at the Nova festival, the IDF would have bombed Gaza a little, engaged in a few light incursions and left.
But because the scale of the atrocities committed on October 7th was so widely publicized in Israel, the people demanded blood, and in such an unstable political situation domestically there was no choice but to enter and destroy Gaza even though it doesn't serve anyone. You can't destroy the impulse that gave rise to Hamas; even if Islamism receded as a force it would only be replaced with secular Palestinian ethnic nationalism (which was just as happy to attack and kill Israelis in the 70s and 80s).
The most likely outcome is that in 10 years the relationship between Israel and Gaza is almost exactly the same as it was on October 6th. The rest is just playing politics.
Israel doesn't want to annex Gaza. Maybe a few hardcore settlers do, but they want to annex the Sinai too (and indeed attempted to settle it while it was under Israeli control). Israel is also a small country, even with a high GDP/capita they can't afford to rule over that many Palestinians indefinitely and they don't want to. It's not really the same thing as other colonial or imperial relationships. Arabs will never accept being ruled by Jews, and the scale of violence required to change that isn't acceptable to America or to the anti-Iran Sunni world that Israel needs to stay on the right side of. Neither Gazans nor the regional Arab powers want [them] to be resettled in the West Bank either, Gaza is Palestine (or part of it) to them.
Israel is in some ways a great example of the failure of democracy amid rising populism.
The only 'smart' thing to do is to withdraw settlers from everywhere except some of East Jerusalem and a few other key locations, force a state upon the Palestinians and hand the 'Emirate of Palestine' (comprising Gaza and the WB) to the Saudis and Emiratis to manage. But in most of Israel, that would be seen as letting the Arabs win and rewarding them for raping and killing and terrorizing Israelis. Nobody who did it would get it past the Knesset, they and their movement would lose power and they might well be assassinated.
Nations do win wars though. The Confederacy was conquered after its armies were defeated and its cities razed. The kingdom of Hawaii is long gone though the spirit of aloha remains. The Comanche likewise are gone. The allies actually did conquer Nazi Germany and Japan. Their leadership was executed and their countries remade in the image of the US. Neither has waged war or even raised an army since.
At some point, a people lose the will to fight. Total war tends to be convincing to that end.
That Japan and Germany don't have an army will be news to their 300k servicemen.
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Israel cannot do this because they also want to annex the West Bank and moving more Palestinians there will make that harder.
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Even if a conquerer has such an obligation, they do not have it until they actually succeed in their conquest. No aid to Germany was provided until WWII was over, for instance.
It's worth mentioning the Dutch famine in the winter of '44-45, which was largely caused by the German occupation, and during which the Allies (and others) tried to get food into the area.
But that's really just an interesting relevant anecdote and doesn't really disprove your general point.
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