Israel/Palestine

If there had been no occupation or at least no day-to-day perpetual collective harassment of ordinary Palestinians (or if the Israelis had left it at guarding the perimeter of the West Bank and the Green Line; if the settlement project opposed by David Ben-Gurion to his dying breath had not been started(ask yourself this: was the abstraction of having the right to live in what no one since Biblical times had called "Judea and Samaria" ever really more important than creating the conditions in which Israel as a state could exist in peace? Has any possible good in the settlements ever been worth the fact that they have always sabotaged any chance for peace between Israelis and Palestinian?); if Begin and Shamir hadn't launched attacks on Palestinian villages that wanted to make peace with Israel, as those men did in the late Seventies and Eighties; If there hadn't been an uninterrupted quarter-century in which the Israeli government anathemized the very idea of a two-state model as "anti-Israel&quot and virtually everyone who supported that idea as antisemitic), it is extremely unlikely that there still wouldn't be peace and that Fatah would exist that Hamas would ever have emerged as a rival force.

You are deluding yourself every time you repeat the discredited meme that this conflict is defined by "hatred of Jews", and every time you insist(as you effectively do) that Palestinians have no legitimate grievances against the Israeli government. Of course there are some Palestinians who are just driven by hate(as could equally be said of pretty much every Likud voter and every illegal West Bank settler). But that's not the explanation for everything Palestinians do. They DO have valid reasons for being outraged by the Occupation and the siege of Gaza. They DO have good reason to feel that collective punishment is unfair(especially since there is next to nothing the average Palestinian could do to get Fatah or Hamas to change tactics or to cease to exist). And they are fully justified in their bitter resentment of the Israeli argument that (despite the power imbalance, despite the much higher casualty rate, including civilians and innocent children, that Palestinians experience compared to Israelis, despite the endless immiseration the IDF and Netanyahu have subjected Palestinians to on a daily, relentless basis) the "pro-Israeli" side insists that Palestinians are solely responsible for this situation and that Israelis are "the real victims".

If YOU were a Palestinian, you would resent all of that, too.

Fifteen years of the iron fist are a total failure. The hard line has done nothing but make everything worse. Why do you defend what you know has never worked and can never worked? Palestinians have never been coddled...they've never experienced anything from the Israeli government but oppression, restriction, and deliberate impoverishment. If that approach has totally failed so far, why double down on it? And why still cling to the delusion that "peace through victory" is possible? This is not a war that anyone can "win" militarily.

The only thing that can make any difference would be if the government you unquestioningly defend admits that the hard line is a dead loss and actually starts treating Palestinians as human beings for a change.