Or the flip side. Hamas promised to continue slaughtering Israeli Arabs, Jews, and Christians until they are all dead. Hezbollah has launched rockets into northern Israel for a year…with 100k+ Israelis forced to relocate south.
What exactly other option does Israel had. Peace talks didn’t go anywhere for last few decades
You're overlooking facts in a way that serves the Israeli narrative and calling opposition to crimes against humanity as "moralizing about being mean". I don't wish to engage with that nonsense (I wonder if you were similarly unimpressed when John Kirby moralized about the Russians "being mean" to Ukrainian children), but lest someone be inclined to believe it:
- After invading their territory and forcibly displacing them from their homes in 1948, the Israeli government would eventually imprison 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza, severely undermining or outright depriving them of their right to food, movement and labor. Rather, the question is why would the Palestinians welcome an militarized immigrant movement whose stated objectives included the total demographic overwhelm of Palestine, changing the "facts on the ground", supported by an interloping British Mandate. This is as true now as it was then.
- So, while the IDF may be engaged in urban warfare with the armed wing of Hamas, their practical goal is the cleansing of the Gaza Strip, including the genocide of Gazans, evidenced by this past year's perfidy-ridden bombing campaign against civilians. (And the March of Return, and Operation Cast Lead, and Operation Protective Edge, and the bombing of the AP office, then the largest number of journalist assassinations ever witnessed... etc etc)
- Aware of the legal liability of this, the American and Israeli governments have been lying about these aims and attempting to generate plausible deniability by claiming the IDF is measured and surgical in their use of long range heavy bombs, and pretending the infinitesimal ratio of enemy combatants killed is Hamas-engineered. They redefine "human shield" and "Hamas combatant" to suit the moment.
- Of course we know that the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does, so nobody who is informed and in their right mind believes these soul sucking, sugar-coated "upper establishment" statements about due diligence or accountability or whatever and pearl clutching about hostages never mind the overwhelmingly higher number of Palestinian hostages taken and tortured by Israel. Despite their toothlessness, the UN, the ICC and the ICJ have allowed the world to show, one inconvenient determination after another, that the truth is plainly visible.
Ultimately, it's just whether they see war crimes when they see children and families being killed systematically, and whether they're cool with it.
I actually agree with most of this. Israel is almost certainly planning on genociding the Palestinians, although they have not yet started. Where we disagree I guess is in our estimation of what can be done to stop Israel. I do not believe there is anything western countries can do to stop Israel from doing whatever they want to make themselves feel safe. The Palestinians do legitimately make them feel unsafe and as long as that is true it’s not possible to stop Israel from genociding them.
I really don’t think the original comment overlooked any of the stuff you pointed out, it just called it all irrelevant.
You say "moralizing about being mean," other people say "opposing genocide." Deliberately trivializing the objections of others is not a good faith argument. Surely you don't think that a 100:1 civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio is par for the course in "every war ever waged," so why say it? You waste everyone's time
Further, you must know that the beliefs you say that Palestinians profess are only actually held by a minority of them. On the same page, Israeli officials have said things like "all Gazans must be destroyed,"[1] but everyone here knows that quotes like these represent the far end of aggression among the group.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/05/wv-israel-ha...
> Israeli officials have said things like "all Gazans must be destroyed,"[1] but everyone here knows that quotes like these represent the far end of aggression among the group.
I unfortunately believe that most Israelis believe this or something like it.
You are right, let me rephrase. They have all the power, opposing the genocide of the palestinians will accomplish nothing as long as the palestinians make the isrealis feel unsafe.
Even if Hamas hadn't eliminated the anti-semitic language from their charter in 2007, that argument would require one to accept that preventatively mass murdering whole families and generations of children is a moral means of dealing with a political opponent.
Options? Israel (the people anyway) has always had the option of finally dropping the ethno-nationalism and apartheid of their foundational principles, and accepting that the Palestinians have a way more material right to Palestinian territory than an American or a European who Israel brought over on a birthright trip.