Even were I to stipulate to what you are asserting (and experts like John Spencer certainly claim otherwise), the upshot would be that Israel is morally obliged to let Hamas survive to threaten both Israel and any non jihadis in the vicinity.
Moreover, Hamas's strategy of deliberately violating international law to purposely maximize its …
Even were I to stipulate to what you are asserting (and experts like John Spencer certainly claim otherwise), the upshot would be that Israel is morally obliged to let Hamas survive to threaten both Israel and any non jihadis in the vicinity.
Moreover, Hamas's strategy of deliberately violating international law to purposely maximize its own side's civilian casualties would become an accepted part of warfare, and Israel's faults would be cited as evidence that resisting organizations like Hamas was too great an evil in and of itself to be tolerable or worthwhile.
So the world would condemn itself to rule by savages because non-savages were forbidden to call their bloody bluff.
Ie, its fault in his view has lain, ironically, in prolonging the war - thereby *increasing* collateral suffering - to satisfy its critics who either don't understand that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." or, for cynical political reasons, don't care.
But If I actually had to choose between having Israel do either what Spencer recommends or what it is currently doing - even if it meant that its leaders were *properly* indicted for war crimes - and giving Hamas and its allies a new and indefinite lease on life, I would accept the former tradeoff. I simply wouldn't want to live in a world where brutality is treated, let alone politically rewarded, as an international norm. I'd rather Israeli leaders were criminally convicted but Hamas and its ilk were soundly defeated than see the latter win.
Realistically, I think Israel will eventually prevail, and I hope Israelis who've committed real, provable crimes are punished. If only because I think the truly fanatical settlers and some of Bibi Netanyahu's coalition partners who coddle or encourage them endanger Israeli social cohesion, not to mention military discipline. (Ben-Gvir, for example, is apparently upset that the IDF doesn't summarily, shoot terrorists (real or suspected) who've already laid down their weapons and surrendered.)
The IDF is a moral professional military organization with also, like any good army, a scattering of disreputable members. The political echelon in Israel today, like many others of its kind has a superabundance of loudmouths. Btw, simply shooting your mouth off intemperately in public after a massacre of your own people, in a manner nonetheless reasonably perceived to be indiscriminately homicidal, may even be a separate war crime if you're a politician with the power tangibly to effect your sentiments. But it's not remotely genocide, though I can understand why it might trigger people who have their own horrible memories.
We're now having a serious debate and I will say I appreciate the fair exchange at this point. I understand your view even if I do not agree with it. I have bad news for you though.
Israel is not going to win this war against Hamas. Precisely because of the brutal nature of the Israeli campaign (John Spencer's assertions aside), it is creating 15 resistant fighters eager to join Hamas for every 1 innocent civilian it kills. It creates about fighter future Hamas fighters for every 1 Hamas militant it kills. With a population of 2 million, Israel will have to kill over 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza to basically win this war of attrition. The world will not stand for this. So what you are left with is a future Hezbollah size and type fighting force in Gaza, probably the West Bank, and now a world that now sees Israel as a brutal terrorist regime in the same manner it viewed Hamas. If anything Palestinian resistance is gaining public support.
So on a strategic level, the Israeli campaign is going to go down in flames as counter effective. All the tactical and operational victories will not be able to overcome the strategic defeat to come. Take it from me, a former U.S. Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you don't take it from General David Petraeus who commanded our forces in Iraq.
Those leaders you are dismissing as loudmouths are causing Israel serious damage, but what is even more terrifying are the words that came out of the Israeli defense minister, prime minister, and president. Those you cannot throw away as irrelevant. The first one said "not a single of humanitarian aid to go to 2 million civilians", the second one gave Israeli troops a biblical commandment to wipe of Gaza as they wiped out Amalek. The third one said "there was no single innocent civilian in Gaza". That U.S. pressure has forced Israel to let humanitarian aid in does nothing to erase the actual intent of Israeli leaders. Their statements, when combined with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich as well as members of the Knesset, you have a frightening number of senior Israeli leaders giving intent to commit genocide.
The dangers you see as endangering Israeli society will only get worse. The ultra nationalistic Israeli campaign for land and expulsion of Palestinians has caused far more rot in Israel than our leaders and theirs are willing to admit, the same rot that was within the Hutu government that started its own ethnic cleansing campaigns from its 1960 independence movement that culminated in the 1994. The parallels are stunningly similar and Israel will not be able to reverse the march towards insanity. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are the future of Israel.
I'd say you're being way, way too deterministic, even fatalistic. Most Israelis dislike Netanyahu, let alone Ben Gvir. Conversely, you are imputing to Gazans a nihilistic, suicidal fanaticism that was not remotely manifested in Germany or Japan after they were battered in WW2. And of course you're attributing much the same mentality to Israelis. That's obviously not my take on the matter.
The last time Israel was overtaken by messianic zealotry was against the Romans, who destroyed the country. I doubt the majority of Jews intend to channel the ultimately self-destructive impulses of 2000 years ago, much though a minority may fantasize about it.
The idea that killing terrorists only creates more terrorists is also an argument for simply letting terrorists have their way. Talk about suicidal. And don't forget that Israel coddled Hamas for years, even funneling cash into Gaza. Which led directly to October 7. Yet you're now hypothesizing that crushing Hamas instead will breed eternal violence. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
But Israel has survived against much greater odds than the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and even Iran. Back in the 1950s and most of the 1960s it had to contend with all the Arab states, plus the Soviet Union. And without the United States. And with but a tiny fraction of its current military and economic power.
Needless to say, your premise that the Israeli government is like the Hutus', is about as plausible from my angle as saying it is like the Third Reich. To be sure, there are risky political currents in Israel, but most of the people with grandiose genocidal dreams are the Palestinian Arabs who haven't abandoned them in 100 years... certainly not the Israeli peaceniks who were slaughtered by Hamas on the Gaza border. But no doubt Hamas targeted them for precisely that reason.
I do hope Sinwar and Haniyeh are not the future of "Palestine," although I don't discount the possibility. But right now a lot of Palestiniians (including the PA) are accusing them of having been Gaza's misfortune. The best way to reinforce that mindset is to ensure that their gunmen don't get away with murder. Of course, a workable "day after" plan would also be nice.
But you should give actual Israelis the benefit of your childhood and adult experiences. Jews can always use another opinion.
The idea that killing terrorists and killing civilians creates more terrorists is not an argument for simply letting terrorists have their way, it is an argument for conducting a population centric-counter insurgency campaign. The mistake Israel is making is similar to what the U.S. forces made in Iraq and Afghanistan. In calling Iraqis and Afghans who opposed us terrorists, we ignored the insurgent nature of their struggles. Hamas is an insurgency, and not a terrorist organization. You don't beat insurgencies by killing their fighters, that is a recipe for the U.S. war in Iraq / Afghanistan / Vietnam. It is the Israel experience in Southern Lebanon. What you have today is Hezbollah instead. That was just as much a strategic failure.
Your world war II analogies to Germany and Japan are flawed, the Germans and Japanese surrendered because they saw in that surrender a political future as independent states but this time on the American side. Palestinians only see further dispossession of their land, not a future Palestinian state. They have nothing to lose at this point. If the American Army had kept killing Japanese and Germans and expelling them from their land after winning the war, a German and Japanese insurgency too would have arrived to kick us out. The United States had no land ambitions to those countries, Israel does. Israel doesn't exist without taking land from Palestine.
Lastly, the Israeli boast that it survived against greater odds of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran is wildly exaggerated. The Soviet Union sent arms to Israel through Czechoslovakia. It in fact recognized Israel before the United States. Americans funneled millions of dollars worth of arms to Israel. And for all the talk of Arab armies invading Israel in 1948, none did, in fact Arab states barely sent meager forces for "show of force" and most set up defensive positions while Israeli troops expelled Palestinians. The largest Arab Army, the Jordanian Legion was neutralized by Israeli negotiators who offered them the West Bank in exchange for letting them take the rest of Israel. The world's largest hidden secret is how the Arab armies in 1948 literally just stood.
Now, I studied military history and so I am a little bit more familiar with these topics to include the Yom Kippur wars and the rest. But after the 1940's the United States embarked on providing Israel with a qualitative military edge against all its peer Arab neighbors, which explains its military dominance today.
If Israeli policy remains the same, the future of Palestinians are Sinwar and Haniyeh, I assure you. And if Israel continues its brutal policies on Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza, its future are Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. The rot of states is real, its a cancer and Israel is almost past the point of no return. But what the hell do I know? I heard my parents discuss the rot of the Hutu government for decades after we escaped. No one thought it was "that bad".
Israelis don't need my experiences, they don't have to go far to learn them, they can look in their own history of persecution. The issue of seeing your persecutors as animals is that in an effort to defend yourself from them, you may become them too.
Okay, then let's cut to the chase. Almost everybody except Bibi and his coalition partners now wants him to find a fig leaf for himself and the PA. But the PA is held in contempt by most Palestinian Arabs, and there is little or no evidence that it could contain Hamas, let alone give reliable assurances to Israelis. There is no evidence, either, that Palestinian Arabs will ever stop fantasizing that the 3500 year old Jewish presence in and claim to the land is illegitimate whereas their own supposedly "indigenous" aspirations are rightful.
On what basis do you imagine that they will have the slightest desire for peace, even if they are handed a state? Ie, of the kind that Israel has offered them multiple times since they rejected UN Partition in 1947?
The PLO's answer to such an offer was to launch the Second Intifada. And the Palestinians obviously didn't care that their rejectionism virtually destroyed the Israeli Left. But today their "moderates" repeat their new mantra of the same 1967 borders whose very offer led their predecessors to smell blood.
It's true that the Germans and the Japanese had something left over with which to console themselves after WW2. The problem with your own analysis is that you add that "Israel doesn't exist without taking land from Palestine." As if "Palestine" - a clever piece of Roman imperial legerdemain intended to obscure the ancient Jewish presence and history, but with little or no actual connection to the Arabs who came centuries later - had an ounce of intrinsic authenticity in the first place.
But it sheds a necessary light on the Palestinian Arab mindset.
If they think Israel's entire existence has been predicated on taking "Palestinian" land and that they are in fact the "Palestinians," why would they ever treat Israel as anything but an interloper? And that's even without adding in the Islamist dimension.
Their actions in the last century suggest no such intention.
Where's the foundation for coexistence besides a grudging mutual sufferance that the Palestinians have never honestly respected and the Israelis are slowly but predictably abandoning?
And that mentality is why this is all going to end up in one state. And when that happens, there are 7 million Palestinians, 2 million in Gaza, 3 million in the West Bank. Israelis comprise about 7 million Jews and 2 million Palestinians. In one country that is effectively half and half. You really think Israel will be able to maintain a military occupation of 5 million Palestinians for an eternity? That is delusional. It hasn't worked for 75 years, what do you think is going to change? Unless the solution is genocide, and ethnic cleansing, there is no way for Israelis to lay claim to the entire land.
The basis of the Israeli claim is based on a 2,000 year old claim to a land based in a religious book of Judaism. Just stop for a minute and absorb how ridiculous such a claim sounds to people outside that religion. It may be the Israeli reality, but that is not the reality of anyone else in the region. It just sounds like a preposterous claim to a land that is in fact not theirs.
Even if I was agree to the stipulation that Israel's claim precedes the Roman Empire, since the Roman empire, the land has been Palestine or a version of Palestine under the Byzantines and the Ottomans. The nations of France, and England, of Germany are much younger than the Roman province of Palestine yet you think the descendants of those Palestinians don't have claim to their homeland.
The first mistake Israel made in 1947 was attempt to expel the local population. Jews fleeing Europe were initially welcome and had they come to live with the locals instead of supplant them we wouldn't be having this conversation. But they tried to supplant them and you do not expect to hand over your country without a fight and so fight they did. It is quiet outlandish to claim that Israelis ever respected Palestinians and wanted to live in the same country when the first actions of the Israeli army was to embark on the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their villages when they were not facing any aggression from those Palestinian villages. In fact Israeli military historians have documented a myriad instances of atrocities by Israeli troops on unsuspecting Palestinian civilians. Had not that happened, millions of those villagers would just be Israeli Muslims. I fear you have your history backwards. Israelis fired the first shot of this conflict.
I would love to take you through the planning and execution of the mass expulsion by Israel's founders who believed that the only way to build Israel was to expel Palestinians. If thats respect, I would be interested to find out what the opposite of that is.
From an outsider, the claims of Israelis to the land are actually quiet outlandish because most nations are much younger than the province of Palestine and you couldn't persuade the Spanish for example to give their land back to the Moors because the descendants of Moors lived in Spain a thousand years ago and were there for over 5 centuries.
There is only one way out of this, Israel will have to stop fighting Palestinians, stop trying to eject them from the land, and welcome them back to their homes and find innovative ways to live with them, give them their citizenship and make serious amends.
You think that is ridiculous? Well there only other way is genocide and I promise Israel does not come out of that end. It will be an international pariah. Half of its American and European allies have already jumped ship and others will follow, and without Europe and the United States, Israel's Arab neighbors will isolate it. The pressure from within and without will be too great and the Israeli state will crumble and in its ashes will rise a Palestinian state.
So Israelis either need to change things fast or their country's fate will be decided. And don't think nuclear powers don't fall, they do. You only need to look at the Soviet Union. When a state implodes from inside, even nuclear weapons don't save it.
I find the idea that the Palestinian Arabs would accept, in good faith, and as a truly permanent solution, anything less than ultimate supremacy in a single state, to be fanciful - all the predictable revisionist history and stacked reasoning you recited to me notwithstanding.
There is simply no basis to believe it.
Especially if all their relatives were invited in, as a crowning form of Israeli penance no less, to tip the demographic balance.
And the more emboldened they were by Israeli concessions, the more they would feel entitled to, and demand. At which point Israel would feel compelled to use force on an unprecedented scale just to keep order.
Personally, I long ago concluded that the conflict has no practical solution. Indeed, that the search for such solutions is a dubious compulsion too often rationalized by the merciless tyranny of logic.
Which doesn't mean temporary fixes can't occasionally be patched together, however emotionally unsatisfying they may be. There is, after all - or at least ought to be - space between genocide and capitulation.
Well, I think the rest of the world is running out of patience with these "temporary" fixes especially those that have led to two different legal systems, one of freedom for Israeli Jews and a military occupation for Palestinians.
Good faith? What good faith, Israel never operated in good faith, its a ridiculous demand to place on Palestinians too. The international community made a mess of this with the whole partition idea, so the international community (cough the United States) needs to impose its will on both Israelis and Palestinians and put them in one state. Thats the only way they make peace. Sure none of them think the other is acting in good faith, but under one flag, they will figure it out. One man, one vote, under a Constitution that protects minority rights and ties the government from actually doing anything without a super majority, sort of like the hot mess of governing we got here in the United States. No one gets their way even when they win elections and get in power lol.
Right now, we've settled for Israeli supremacy in one state, no one is pretending anymore Palestinians govern themselves. They live under Israeli military rule. That is fundamentally unacceptable. So, lets just end the charade, remove Israeli supremacy, put both peoples in one state and force them to live together.
The notion that Israel will prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their home is equally preposterous and shall not stand.
I doubt the American public would support a US/NATO occupation of Greater Israel to effect it, because that's what it would take in the foreseeable future.
Or you could just wait (and hope) for Israel to annex the territories, and then root for Nature to take its "logical" (?) course.
Can you force a multinational state into lasting being? I guess there's Belgium, and, for the time being, Spain and the decaying UK. And what's left of Lebanon. Then again, Yugoslavia and the old Soviet Union fell apart.
Yours is ultimately a case for empire. I've actually always felt it was too bad Austria-Hungary disappeared. But maybe that's because my DNA test claimed I shared ancient genes with the Habsburgs' Marie Antoinette. Not too encouraging there either.
The UK is a case of two separate states and an additional province belonging to Ireland that might peacefully go their separate ways peacefully. Not bad. Belgium seems just fine. Spain I am not very familiar with. Lebanon is destabilized by the Israel/Palestinian problem not an internal problem. Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union fell apart because they were ruled by corrupt communist dictators whose rule led to the rot of the state. Either way Israel/Palestine resembles far more like the United States where black and white Americans are learning to live in the same nation after Jim Crow and slavery.
Also the American public currently doesn't support lots of things including arming Israel. Its not like the government listens.
The cases you cited have lasted well, and the separations will less blood if not outright peaceful than the current conflict of Israel/Palestine.
Israel HAS annexed those territories, its delusion to think it hasn't, it has. What hasn't happened is Palestinians getting their full rights as citizens and so we need to end this.
We don't need an occupation, I am assuming the Israelis are friendly so we won't be getting attacked from them, and we have U.S. presence in Germany today, as long as we're not there to fight a war with the locals we would be fine.
As for Palestinians, they gain full rights as citizens, vote, participate in government, get the return of their refugees in Lebanon, Jordan etc... and suddenly those who seek to affect the future of the state from a political path suddenly have the tools and they are confident they would be in much better political position than today, so they have something to gain and so would work in the political system and so need the Americans as guarantors of their rights.
The Israeli Jews too would need American guarantors to ensure in the short term their political rights are maintained. In the long term the political dynamics work themselves out the same way they have worked themselves out between Americans of African descent and those of European descent. Sure its not perfection but its not Jim Crow either and whoever said life should be perfect is a perfect moron lol.
Empire by definition is actually not bad, an empire is where multi ethnic, multi religious and multi states can coexist together under one flag, the difference being that today the empires are not ruled by the iron fist of one man / throne. The United States is by definition an empire. Even without counting the non voting territories (we need to fix that).
But back to the present, the solution is one state for all, the rights for Jews and Palestinians to live in the entire country. Palestinians who lost their homes should be recompensed partially by the UN for screwing them over and the state of Israel can make the other compensations but allow them to live anywhere, the rule of law enshrined to not favor Jews or Muslims or the tiny number of Christians there, remove religion from the state (as we have tried here lol).
I have to credit you for optimism. Of course I'm highly skeptical, particularly of some of your premises, but I still find your ultimate outlook refreshing, as you're one of the few people who actually seems to think matters can be worked out.
Even were I to stipulate to what you are asserting (and experts like John Spencer certainly claim otherwise), the upshot would be that Israel is morally obliged to let Hamas survive to threaten both Israel and any non jihadis in the vicinity.
Moreover, Hamas's strategy of deliberately violating international law to purposely maximize its own side's civilian casualties would become an accepted part of warfare, and Israel's faults would be cited as evidence that resisting organizations like Hamas was too great an evil in and of itself to be tolerable or worthwhile.
So the world would condemn itself to rule by savages because non-savages were forbidden to call their bloody bluff.
Of course, Spencer himself believes Israel has actually conducted the war more humanely than literally any army in history. And not necessarily for the better. https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/05/17/opinions/israel-gaza-hamas-war-us-arms-spencer
Ie, its fault in his view has lain, ironically, in prolonging the war - thereby *increasing* collateral suffering - to satisfy its critics who either don't understand that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." or, for cynical political reasons, don't care.
But If I actually had to choose between having Israel do either what Spencer recommends or what it is currently doing - even if it meant that its leaders were *properly* indicted for war crimes - and giving Hamas and its allies a new and indefinite lease on life, I would accept the former tradeoff. I simply wouldn't want to live in a world where brutality is treated, let alone politically rewarded, as an international norm. I'd rather Israeli leaders were criminally convicted but Hamas and its ilk were soundly defeated than see the latter win.
Realistically, I think Israel will eventually prevail, and I hope Israelis who've committed real, provable crimes are punished. If only because I think the truly fanatical settlers and some of Bibi Netanyahu's coalition partners who coddle or encourage them endanger Israeli social cohesion, not to mention military discipline. (Ben-Gvir, for example, is apparently upset that the IDF doesn't summarily, shoot terrorists (real or suspected) who've already laid down their weapons and surrendered.)
The IDF is a moral professional military organization with also, like any good army, a scattering of disreputable members. The political echelon in Israel today, like many others of its kind has a superabundance of loudmouths. Btw, simply shooting your mouth off intemperately in public after a massacre of your own people, in a manner nonetheless reasonably perceived to be indiscriminately homicidal, may even be a separate war crime if you're a politician with the power tangibly to effect your sentiments. But it's not remotely genocide, though I can understand why it might trigger people who have their own horrible memories.
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We're now having a serious debate and I will say I appreciate the fair exchange at this point. I understand your view even if I do not agree with it. I have bad news for you though.
Israel is not going to win this war against Hamas. Precisely because of the brutal nature of the Israeli campaign (John Spencer's assertions aside), it is creating 15 resistant fighters eager to join Hamas for every 1 innocent civilian it kills. It creates about fighter future Hamas fighters for every 1 Hamas militant it kills. With a population of 2 million, Israel will have to kill over 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza to basically win this war of attrition. The world will not stand for this. So what you are left with is a future Hezbollah size and type fighting force in Gaza, probably the West Bank, and now a world that now sees Israel as a brutal terrorist regime in the same manner it viewed Hamas. If anything Palestinian resistance is gaining public support.
So on a strategic level, the Israeli campaign is going to go down in flames as counter effective. All the tactical and operational victories will not be able to overcome the strategic defeat to come. Take it from me, a former U.S. Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you don't take it from General David Petraeus who commanded our forces in Iraq.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/13/israel-gaza-hamas-counterinsurgency/
Those leaders you are dismissing as loudmouths are causing Israel serious damage, but what is even more terrifying are the words that came out of the Israeli defense minister, prime minister, and president. Those you cannot throw away as irrelevant. The first one said "not a single of humanitarian aid to go to 2 million civilians", the second one gave Israeli troops a biblical commandment to wipe of Gaza as they wiped out Amalek. The third one said "there was no single innocent civilian in Gaza". That U.S. pressure has forced Israel to let humanitarian aid in does nothing to erase the actual intent of Israeli leaders. Their statements, when combined with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich as well as members of the Knesset, you have a frightening number of senior Israeli leaders giving intent to commit genocide.
The dangers you see as endangering Israeli society will only get worse. The ultra nationalistic Israeli campaign for land and expulsion of Palestinians has caused far more rot in Israel than our leaders and theirs are willing to admit, the same rot that was within the Hutu government that started its own ethnic cleansing campaigns from its 1960 independence movement that culminated in the 1994. The parallels are stunningly similar and Israel will not be able to reverse the march towards insanity. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are the future of Israel.
I'd say you're being way, way too deterministic, even fatalistic. Most Israelis dislike Netanyahu, let alone Ben Gvir. Conversely, you are imputing to Gazans a nihilistic, suicidal fanaticism that was not remotely manifested in Germany or Japan after they were battered in WW2. And of course you're attributing much the same mentality to Israelis. That's obviously not my take on the matter.
The last time Israel was overtaken by messianic zealotry was against the Romans, who destroyed the country. I doubt the majority of Jews intend to channel the ultimately self-destructive impulses of 2000 years ago, much though a minority may fantasize about it.
The idea that killing terrorists only creates more terrorists is also an argument for simply letting terrorists have their way. Talk about suicidal. And don't forget that Israel coddled Hamas for years, even funneling cash into Gaza. Which led directly to October 7. Yet you're now hypothesizing that crushing Hamas instead will breed eternal violence. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
But Israel has survived against much greater odds than the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and even Iran. Back in the 1950s and most of the 1960s it had to contend with all the Arab states, plus the Soviet Union. And without the United States. And with but a tiny fraction of its current military and economic power.
Needless to say, your premise that the Israeli government is like the Hutus', is about as plausible from my angle as saying it is like the Third Reich. To be sure, there are risky political currents in Israel, but most of the people with grandiose genocidal dreams are the Palestinian Arabs who haven't abandoned them in 100 years... certainly not the Israeli peaceniks who were slaughtered by Hamas on the Gaza border. But no doubt Hamas targeted them for precisely that reason.
I do hope Sinwar and Haniyeh are not the future of "Palestine," although I don't discount the possibility. But right now a lot of Palestiniians (including the PA) are accusing them of having been Gaza's misfortune. The best way to reinforce that mindset is to ensure that their gunmen don't get away with murder. Of course, a workable "day after" plan would also be nice.
But you should give actual Israelis the benefit of your childhood and adult experiences. Jews can always use another opinion.
The idea that killing terrorists and killing civilians creates more terrorists is not an argument for simply letting terrorists have their way, it is an argument for conducting a population centric-counter insurgency campaign. The mistake Israel is making is similar to what the U.S. forces made in Iraq and Afghanistan. In calling Iraqis and Afghans who opposed us terrorists, we ignored the insurgent nature of their struggles. Hamas is an insurgency, and not a terrorist organization. You don't beat insurgencies by killing their fighters, that is a recipe for the U.S. war in Iraq / Afghanistan / Vietnam. It is the Israel experience in Southern Lebanon. What you have today is Hezbollah instead. That was just as much a strategic failure.
Your world war II analogies to Germany and Japan are flawed, the Germans and Japanese surrendered because they saw in that surrender a political future as independent states but this time on the American side. Palestinians only see further dispossession of their land, not a future Palestinian state. They have nothing to lose at this point. If the American Army had kept killing Japanese and Germans and expelling them from their land after winning the war, a German and Japanese insurgency too would have arrived to kick us out. The United States had no land ambitions to those countries, Israel does. Israel doesn't exist without taking land from Palestine.
Lastly, the Israeli boast that it survived against greater odds of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran is wildly exaggerated. The Soviet Union sent arms to Israel through Czechoslovakia. It in fact recognized Israel before the United States. Americans funneled millions of dollars worth of arms to Israel. And for all the talk of Arab armies invading Israel in 1948, none did, in fact Arab states barely sent meager forces for "show of force" and most set up defensive positions while Israeli troops expelled Palestinians. The largest Arab Army, the Jordanian Legion was neutralized by Israeli negotiators who offered them the West Bank in exchange for letting them take the rest of Israel. The world's largest hidden secret is how the Arab armies in 1948 literally just stood.
Now, I studied military history and so I am a little bit more familiar with these topics to include the Yom Kippur wars and the rest. But after the 1940's the United States embarked on providing Israel with a qualitative military edge against all its peer Arab neighbors, which explains its military dominance today.
If Israeli policy remains the same, the future of Palestinians are Sinwar and Haniyeh, I assure you. And if Israel continues its brutal policies on Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza, its future are Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. The rot of states is real, its a cancer and Israel is almost past the point of no return. But what the hell do I know? I heard my parents discuss the rot of the Hutu government for decades after we escaped. No one thought it was "that bad".
Israelis don't need my experiences, they don't have to go far to learn them, they can look in their own history of persecution. The issue of seeing your persecutors as animals is that in an effort to defend yourself from them, you may become them too.
Okay, then let's cut to the chase. Almost everybody except Bibi and his coalition partners now wants him to find a fig leaf for himself and the PA. But the PA is held in contempt by most Palestinian Arabs, and there is little or no evidence that it could contain Hamas, let alone give reliable assurances to Israelis. There is no evidence, either, that Palestinian Arabs will ever stop fantasizing that the 3500 year old Jewish presence in and claim to the land is illegitimate whereas their own supposedly "indigenous" aspirations are rightful.
On what basis do you imagine that they will have the slightest desire for peace, even if they are handed a state? Ie, of the kind that Israel has offered them multiple times since they rejected UN Partition in 1947?
The PLO's answer to such an offer was to launch the Second Intifada. And the Palestinians obviously didn't care that their rejectionism virtually destroyed the Israeli Left. But today their "moderates" repeat their new mantra of the same 1967 borders whose very offer led their predecessors to smell blood.
It's true that the Germans and the Japanese had something left over with which to console themselves after WW2. The problem with your own analysis is that you add that "Israel doesn't exist without taking land from Palestine." As if "Palestine" - a clever piece of Roman imperial legerdemain intended to obscure the ancient Jewish presence and history, but with little or no actual connection to the Arabs who came centuries later - had an ounce of intrinsic authenticity in the first place.
But it sheds a necessary light on the Palestinian Arab mindset.
If they think Israel's entire existence has been predicated on taking "Palestinian" land and that they are in fact the "Palestinians," why would they ever treat Israel as anything but an interloper? And that's even without adding in the Islamist dimension.
Their actions in the last century suggest no such intention.
Where's the foundation for coexistence besides a grudging mutual sufferance that the Palestinians have never honestly respected and the Israelis are slowly but predictably abandoning?
And that mentality is why this is all going to end up in one state. And when that happens, there are 7 million Palestinians, 2 million in Gaza, 3 million in the West Bank. Israelis comprise about 7 million Jews and 2 million Palestinians. In one country that is effectively half and half. You really think Israel will be able to maintain a military occupation of 5 million Palestinians for an eternity? That is delusional. It hasn't worked for 75 years, what do you think is going to change? Unless the solution is genocide, and ethnic cleansing, there is no way for Israelis to lay claim to the entire land.
The basis of the Israeli claim is based on a 2,000 year old claim to a land based in a religious book of Judaism. Just stop for a minute and absorb how ridiculous such a claim sounds to people outside that religion. It may be the Israeli reality, but that is not the reality of anyone else in the region. It just sounds like a preposterous claim to a land that is in fact not theirs.
Even if I was agree to the stipulation that Israel's claim precedes the Roman Empire, since the Roman empire, the land has been Palestine or a version of Palestine under the Byzantines and the Ottomans. The nations of France, and England, of Germany are much younger than the Roman province of Palestine yet you think the descendants of those Palestinians don't have claim to their homeland.
The first mistake Israel made in 1947 was attempt to expel the local population. Jews fleeing Europe were initially welcome and had they come to live with the locals instead of supplant them we wouldn't be having this conversation. But they tried to supplant them and you do not expect to hand over your country without a fight and so fight they did. It is quiet outlandish to claim that Israelis ever respected Palestinians and wanted to live in the same country when the first actions of the Israeli army was to embark on the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their villages when they were not facing any aggression from those Palestinian villages. In fact Israeli military historians have documented a myriad instances of atrocities by Israeli troops on unsuspecting Palestinian civilians. Had not that happened, millions of those villagers would just be Israeli Muslims. I fear you have your history backwards. Israelis fired the first shot of this conflict.
I would love to take you through the planning and execution of the mass expulsion by Israel's founders who believed that the only way to build Israel was to expel Palestinians. If thats respect, I would be interested to find out what the opposite of that is.
From an outsider, the claims of Israelis to the land are actually quiet outlandish because most nations are much younger than the province of Palestine and you couldn't persuade the Spanish for example to give their land back to the Moors because the descendants of Moors lived in Spain a thousand years ago and were there for over 5 centuries.
There is only one way out of this, Israel will have to stop fighting Palestinians, stop trying to eject them from the land, and welcome them back to their homes and find innovative ways to live with them, give them their citizenship and make serious amends.
You think that is ridiculous? Well there only other way is genocide and I promise Israel does not come out of that end. It will be an international pariah. Half of its American and European allies have already jumped ship and others will follow, and without Europe and the United States, Israel's Arab neighbors will isolate it. The pressure from within and without will be too great and the Israeli state will crumble and in its ashes will rise a Palestinian state.
So Israelis either need to change things fast or their country's fate will be decided. And don't think nuclear powers don't fall, they do. You only need to look at the Soviet Union. When a state implodes from inside, even nuclear weapons don't save it.
I find the idea that the Palestinian Arabs would accept, in good faith, and as a truly permanent solution, anything less than ultimate supremacy in a single state, to be fanciful - all the predictable revisionist history and stacked reasoning you recited to me notwithstanding.
There is simply no basis to believe it.
Especially if all their relatives were invited in, as a crowning form of Israeli penance no less, to tip the demographic balance.
And the more emboldened they were by Israeli concessions, the more they would feel entitled to, and demand. At which point Israel would feel compelled to use force on an unprecedented scale just to keep order.
Personally, I long ago concluded that the conflict has no practical solution. Indeed, that the search for such solutions is a dubious compulsion too often rationalized by the merciless tyranny of logic.
Which doesn't mean temporary fixes can't occasionally be patched together, however emotionally unsatisfying they may be. There is, after all - or at least ought to be - space between genocide and capitulation.
Well, I think the rest of the world is running out of patience with these "temporary" fixes especially those that have led to two different legal systems, one of freedom for Israeli Jews and a military occupation for Palestinians.
Good faith? What good faith, Israel never operated in good faith, its a ridiculous demand to place on Palestinians too. The international community made a mess of this with the whole partition idea, so the international community (cough the United States) needs to impose its will on both Israelis and Palestinians and put them in one state. Thats the only way they make peace. Sure none of them think the other is acting in good faith, but under one flag, they will figure it out. One man, one vote, under a Constitution that protects minority rights and ties the government from actually doing anything without a super majority, sort of like the hot mess of governing we got here in the United States. No one gets their way even when they win elections and get in power lol.
Right now, we've settled for Israeli supremacy in one state, no one is pretending anymore Palestinians govern themselves. They live under Israeli military rule. That is fundamentally unacceptable. So, lets just end the charade, remove Israeli supremacy, put both peoples in one state and force them to live together.
The notion that Israel will prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their home is equally preposterous and shall not stand.
I doubt the American public would support a US/NATO occupation of Greater Israel to effect it, because that's what it would take in the foreseeable future.
Or you could just wait (and hope) for Israel to annex the territories, and then root for Nature to take its "logical" (?) course.
Can you force a multinational state into lasting being? I guess there's Belgium, and, for the time being, Spain and the decaying UK. And what's left of Lebanon. Then again, Yugoslavia and the old Soviet Union fell apart.
Yours is ultimately a case for empire. I've actually always felt it was too bad Austria-Hungary disappeared. But maybe that's because my DNA test claimed I shared ancient genes with the Habsburgs' Marie Antoinette. Not too encouraging there either.
The UK is a case of two separate states and an additional province belonging to Ireland that might peacefully go their separate ways peacefully. Not bad. Belgium seems just fine. Spain I am not very familiar with. Lebanon is destabilized by the Israel/Palestinian problem not an internal problem. Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union fell apart because they were ruled by corrupt communist dictators whose rule led to the rot of the state. Either way Israel/Palestine resembles far more like the United States where black and white Americans are learning to live in the same nation after Jim Crow and slavery.
Also the American public currently doesn't support lots of things including arming Israel. Its not like the government listens.
The cases you cited have lasted well, and the separations will less blood if not outright peaceful than the current conflict of Israel/Palestine.
Israel HAS annexed those territories, its delusion to think it hasn't, it has. What hasn't happened is Palestinians getting their full rights as citizens and so we need to end this.
We don't need an occupation, I am assuming the Israelis are friendly so we won't be getting attacked from them, and we have U.S. presence in Germany today, as long as we're not there to fight a war with the locals we would be fine.
As for Palestinians, they gain full rights as citizens, vote, participate in government, get the return of their refugees in Lebanon, Jordan etc... and suddenly those who seek to affect the future of the state from a political path suddenly have the tools and they are confident they would be in much better political position than today, so they have something to gain and so would work in the political system and so need the Americans as guarantors of their rights.
The Israeli Jews too would need American guarantors to ensure in the short term their political rights are maintained. In the long term the political dynamics work themselves out the same way they have worked themselves out between Americans of African descent and those of European descent. Sure its not perfection but its not Jim Crow either and whoever said life should be perfect is a perfect moron lol.
Empire by definition is actually not bad, an empire is where multi ethnic, multi religious and multi states can coexist together under one flag, the difference being that today the empires are not ruled by the iron fist of one man / throne. The United States is by definition an empire. Even without counting the non voting territories (we need to fix that).
But back to the present, the solution is one state for all, the rights for Jews and Palestinians to live in the entire country. Palestinians who lost their homes should be recompensed partially by the UN for screwing them over and the state of Israel can make the other compensations but allow them to live anywhere, the rule of law enshrined to not favor Jews or Muslims or the tiny number of Christians there, remove religion from the state (as we have tried here lol).
I have to credit you for optimism. Of course I'm highly skeptical, particularly of some of your premises, but I still find your ultimate outlook refreshing, as you're one of the few people who actually seems to think matters can be worked out.