And I mean for both sides - long-term, something more than a cessation of hostilities. Do you think it’s even possible to be anything other than an intractable problem? You’ve mentioned Israeli concessions before. Care to list a few you have in mind? What about the Palestinians? I view previous peace negotiations as shams, with neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians truly interested in burying the hatchet. You’re a lot less pessimistic/negative on the issue than I am, and much more knowledgeable and well-informed to boot. And so I’d like to know your thoughts on the matter.
My totally unrealistic solution is to go from buying off to buying out. By which I mean Israel buys the Gaza Strip, and at a price that hurts. Send the Palestinians, or at least the Gazans, to Egypt or KSA not as refugees but as homeowners in a planned city. Build Neom, build THE LINE — a feasible version, that is — and populate a portion of it with Palestinians. And the Muslim world should chip in as well. If they really care, let them put their money where their mouth is. MBS will be happy for the interest and the investment. Too pie in the sky? Sure, but I’ve heard worse.
EDIT: I just remembered Forest City, Johor in Malaysia, which is a recently built planned city that’s more or less a ghost town. China might go along as it’d help bail out Country Gardens.
The numbers I see, which, yes, come from a Hamas-controlled ministry but are confirmed as at least roughly accurate by various more reliable sources, are something like 6000-7000 children killed, at least, out of 18 000 or more total.
Meanwhile, the IDF says it has killed 5000 fighters and that roughly 1 out of every 3 casualties is a fighter - which still means 10 000 non-combatants dead, of which considering the Gaza demographics, it's still likely that half or more are children.
So let's suppose for the sake of the argument that really the number should be 5000, or even 4000, rather than 6 or 7000. Does that really make much of a difference morally speaking? Am I not allowed to refer to that as a 'staggering' number? Or maybe the IDF is lying too and really it's all a big setup and the real number is orders of magnitude smaller, is that what you're trying to claim?
Moreover, it's not only about the dead, but also about the suffering of the living. Pretty much everybody in Gaza, of which as discussed a very large proportion are children, is suffering from the lack of food, clean water, health care, destroyed homes and so on.
I hate to tell you, though I suspect you know it already, but my attitude is a lot more sympathetic to your position than that of most people outside Israel. Yes, it's easy to criticize from far away but the point remains that what Israel has been doing is wrong not only for moral reasons, but also for strategic reasons.
The Yezidis didn't have an army but the Iraqi Kurds and various other factions in Syria and Iraq could and did fight ISIS, yes. But the circumstances were nothing like the ones in this case, so that fighting didn't result in anything like these ratios of dead civilians and dead children, nor in the mass suffering of two million people.
Don't do what they want you to do seems like a good starting point. And yes, it's absolutely true that way too many people in the US or Europe gloss over not only Hamas' actions on October 7th themselves, but also the horrible fact that they actually intended to provoke such a response - and hence bear part of the responsibility for it.
But still only a part. It's still Israel that's deciding that killing thousands of children and causing untold misery for two million people is all worth it for killing a few thousand Hamas fighters who they can easily replace from all the new support they are getting because of this.
It seems to me like the only real gain for Israel from these attacks is to reassure its own population, to make sure its citizens don't feel like they are 'cowering behind walls proven to fail' as you said. Of course that's an important goal for any government - but don't be surprised if few people outside Israel think that it's worth this price.
Yeah, so from the perspective of people who figure that any life has value, a Palestinian life just as much as an Israeli one, THIS is the 'horrific' choice, and the alternative of Israel reacting in a more measured and careful manner, to the dismay of most of its citizens, is the 'bad' one.
I'm sure you're also reading the same headlines as me about how support for Hamas in the West Bank has skyrocketed in the last two months... as well as the headlines about the clandestine Israeli support for Hamas a few decades ago when that was seen as strategically useful to undermine the PLO.
No, it was the failure to reach a peace deal that led here. You can't get lasting peace until there's a solution that's workable for the Palestinians - but of course that would require major concessions from Israel, which are only becoming more painful over time due to the settlements and new generations becoming used to the current borders, not to mention the growth in relative strength of religious and secular right-wing extremists who think 'Judea and Samaria' should all be Israeli.
It would have gained you a lot more international legitimacy if it hadn't been undermined by the continuation and expansion of the settlements on the West Bank - and if it had been done as part of reviving the peace process, instead of a unilateral move like that because Sharon didn't want to be seen negotiating with the Palestinians.
Well why do you think they didn't actually get involved to any major extent, then?
I'd assume that both are true - that many people in Hamas did focus more on the governing than on new attacks, but a limited number waited for their opportunity to strike. Israeli intelligence dropped the ball on this, but still you'd have to assume that Hamas was wary enough to keep the number of people who were fully in the loop of the plans very small until the last possible minute.
It is possible indeed that I'll be proven wrong, in the long term, in my assessment of Hezbollah as a smaller problem than Hamas. But I don't think so - because either they will keep being distracted by the complicated political situation in Lebanon, or they will somehow end up taking over Lebanon completely, in which case they might become an even bigger conventional threat, but in the process they'd also become more an enemy government that can be conventionally defeated. And Lebanon, for all its problems, isn't the Gaza strip.
It had no negotiated peace, no, but there was a cease fire with Israel accepting that Hamas would remain in charge, and the damage in that war wasn't remotely comparable to this one.
The last bit is new to me - you mean so in a future conflict Israel could interrupt the supply of diesel to cripple local transport but the Gaza Strip could continue to have electricity? Are there any actual plans for building renewable energy plants in Gaza?
As for Hamas leadership being eliminated, well, after what happened on Oct 7th, I wouldn't be shedding any tears over them if they were eliminated like the leadership of Black September was back in the 1970s, but obviously I don't agree this whole conflict should be continued for that purpose.
