First of all, sorry for being away from this topic.
Eyal wrote:If Hamas is a prison gang, it's one which has been controlling the prison. For a decade and a half, we tried to avoid going into Gaza. We went so far as to try to buy off Hamas to keep things fairly quiet. And make no mistake, for all that Netanyahu is being exorciated now for "supporting" Hamas, the entire Western world supported that. I still remember the horror leftists expressed when Lieberman - who called for overthrowing the Hamas government - was appointed defense minister in 2017, thinking he would carry through.
To me, the israeli strategy of trying to contain palestinians by occasionally throwing a bone towards Hamas looks a lot like keeping a hostile force alive because the idea of peace is too threatening to the status quo.
In retrospect, we should have gone in back in 2007. Before Hamas had time to build up its weapons, fortify Gaza, dig its tunnels everywhere and develop its rockets so that now the entirety of Israel is in range. But we didn't. We were afraid of the casualties, both ours and the Palestinians. And now we have over 1200 dead and 240 hostages who no-one knows if they are even alive.
This looks to me very much like a self-inflicted wound. Israeli politics regarding palestinians have resulted in creating the world's largest open-air prison, a prison that has been consistently shrinking, with absurd restrictions on the people inside. Sooner or later, it was going to explode. Now it did, and the vaunted "most precise military in the world" is killing innocents left and right because urban combat is hell.
So once again, fuck that. Hamas has proven that we can't live with it as Gaza's ruler. And despite all the fantasies I've seen over social media, there's no clean way to root them out.
Correct, there isn't. There's literal decades of bad blood, this can't be resolved by police action. Hamas isn't a suitable government for gaza or palestinians, but neither is Israel.
but the aggressor in this conflict? It's not Hamas.
You know, I have a lot of respect for you. This is making me reconsider.
[/quote]
I am sorry to hear that. The thing is, I try to be consistent in my opinions and writings. If I see something that looks very much like a government engaging in ethnic cleansing, then I know which side I am going to be on - especially when around me, very moderate and reasonable calls for cease-fires, calls for empathy and to minimize suffering are equated with open support for terrorism by the establishment.
No country should be allowed to commit atrocities within or without its borders. Not Russia, not Israel, not the US, not Germany, noone.
I have no grand idea for how to fix Israel and Palestine. There is nothing I can offer in that regard. All I can see is people being made to suffer because the political powers have maneuvered themselves into a situation where said suffering became unavoidable, and now doubling and tripling down on the decisions that created this mess.