34 Comments

"There is, at the end of the day, only one relationship that Israel cannot afford to lose: the United States. And they’re in no danger of doing so."

Unfortunately, this is now a long-term danger, which should be a motivating force for Israel to address the Hamas problem once and for all *right now.*

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Feb 28·edited Feb 28

I honestly don't know there is any right answer for this. People smarter than me have been trying to figure that out for longer than I've been alive. I say we put an offer on the table for all comers, to relocate one side to Wyoming, and the other to Montana. They get their own reservations. Reservations are already everywhere. Alternatively, pressure the Mormons to give up some of Utah. They already think this is the original homeland of the Jews and Palestinians anyway.

At the very least, it would cost less lives and probably less money than our current strategy.

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That's a great dream, and I'm sure Wyoming and Montana would either/both love to take in millions of Palestinians, 80% of them supporting the use of torture, rape, murder and abduction against civilians.

Jokes aside, the Israel/Palestine conflict, as the left loves to call it, has had less casualties since 1860 than the Syrian civil ware since 2011, or Ukraine in 2 years, or Yemen since 2014. A lot less. The only reason people are so obsessed with it, is because Israel is the only Jewish state.

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To your first point, Hamas didn't even enjoy majority support when they were elected. And if you have a beef with public support of torture, I have some uncomfortable information to share about US foreign policy and public opinion over the last few decades.

Your second bit is just kinda dumb. That you're reaching way back into the Ottoman Empire makes me think you don't really understand the uncomfortable baggage that entails on its own...or even really get the reference to the Ottomans in the first place. Other than that it's just getting into whataboutism territory. If Jake has kidney failure but Tom has cancer, that doesn't make Jake's situation any better. Human suffering isn't a contest.

Most importantly, nobody gives a flying fuck about Wyoming or Montana.

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There haven't been elections since 2006 since both the Palestinian Authority and Hams are totalitarian organizations. The reality is that among the Palestinians in Gaza 57% support Hamas, among Palestinians of the West Bank 80% support Hamas, and among the Palestinian diaspora - well we've seen that they celebrate the massacres of Hamas. They were ecstatic about the rapes, torture, murder and abduction on October 7 and the following days. The farther away from conflict, the more Palestinians want a forever war with Israel until all Jews are killed or exiled. Sorry, but you're not scaring me with news I already know, and if you weren't a shill for islamists, you'd know that there is absolutely no comparison between the sadism and murderousness of Islamist terrorists and Iranian proxies and any democracy, including the US and Israel.

Are numbers dumb? The "Palestinians" (i.e. Arabs living in that part of the Ottoman Empire and British Empire) have murdered Jews since 1860, and the numbers are nowhere near any other conflict involving Muslims - multiple Yemen civil wars, Syrian civil war, and many other conflicts are so much larger, and the only thing they lack for frothing at the mouth reactions from leftists and conservative muslims is JEWS. No Jews, no news.

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Winning a war isn’t genocide, but genocide is genocide. I’ve unsubscribed from your genocide-apologist rag.

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Why do I get the feeling you're replying to the headline without actually reading the article...?

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The left does love shouting "genocide" at Israel with zero proof of such a thing, but then celebrate Hamas with its openly declared goal of a genocide and ethnic cleansing for 7 million Israeli Jews and 'collaborator' deaths for 2 million Israeli Arabs. Now that's morals!

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It's a great story, the unfortunate part is it's wearing a bit thin, like too little butter scraped over too much bread. 🤷

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Hamas apologists being the bread? Fuck 'em, no butter for them!

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Life and death is indeed hilarious.

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What it is depends on what the plan is for afterward. See Ross Barkan's recent piece - what is the plan for afterward? More of the same? That's how we got here. As he says - where is the Marshall Plan for Gaza?

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Where was the Marshall Plan for Europe when the Nazis were still not defeated?

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Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967 - that was the best time for a Marshall Plan for Gaza. The next best time is now. The lesson of Versailles was hard-learnt. Ignoring that lesson is a ghastly injustice to the millions who died.

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Millions haven't died in the Israel/Palestine conflict. In fact it's one of the smallest conflicts in the world, spread over more than a hundred years. Syria and Yemen and Ukraine and many other places have had far more people die in just a tiny number of years. Yet everyone in the universe is obsessed with Israel because it's a Jewish state, and no other reason.

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Please read more carefully. ignoring the lesson of Versailles - to wit, that debilitating punitive measures do not ensure lasting peace - is a ghastly injustice to the millions who died in the Second World War. The horrors of the second war were even greater than the horrors of the first -- even so, even as the dictatorial administrations and their adherents were prosecuted as the monsters they were, the necessity of the reconciliation of the civil nation was acknowledged.

As you say, far fewer, in total, have died in the late conflict in the Holy Land. This might mean that reconciliation of the civil nation there will not be so difficult. I would be concerned that the multi-generational nature of the conflict, and the persistence of occasional and aggravating tragedy throughout the period, along with rare moments of mass tragedy, might make reconciliation in fact a more difficult task than it was in Europe. I would not, however, let that deter me from advocating the necessity of its accomplishment; its accomplishment being, if this violence is ever to end, an inherent necessity.

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This is a bad metaphor. You'd think it's not in the best interest of Palestinians to be free of a totalitarian Islamist theocracy that designates them as human shields. The Palestinians have as much to gain by the military destruction of Hamas as Israel. Islamist terrorism has achieved zero - took Gaza, which was given by Israel to the Palestinians as a second installment on a Palestinian state, and turned into a rocket artillery base in service of Iran.

Without this ground operation everyone returns to the status quo that serves Iran, the far left, and nobody else. The military occupation of Germany and Japan were good for both nations, but before that stage started a whole lot of destruction deservedly fell on both countries.

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The question is not complicated: "What is the plan for afterward?"

Your plan is "punish them until they like us better." If you can't see the problem with that, I have bad news about your eyes.

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