13 Comments

This is all quite backwards. Correct, Oct 7 didn't happen in a vacuum. Hamas has been attacking Israel since 2007 and has provoked several smaller conflicts making life for citizens in Israel proper impossible. No country should have to live like this. And it appears, according to polls that the Gaza citizens strongly support Hamas so sadly they are suffering the consequences. Israelis will decide what happens after and who will lead not you and not Biden.

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The Palestinian cold war against Israel has been going on since at least the early 1970s, after the failure of the various hot wars. Certainly the Israelis have been more than willing to live in peace; however, it only takes one to start a war.

I'm no fan of ethnic cleansing, but I haven't heard any alternate solutions that are practical.

What *will* you do with a neighboring population that wants you dead? "From the river to the sea" is explicitly a call for genocide.

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"Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty."

1977 Likud Election manifesto.

Yes, what will you do when a neighboring population wants you dead.

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How dare the Jews not simply lay down and die. The bastards.

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How dare the Palestinians not simply lay down and die. The bastards.

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I’m unaware of any Israelis who travel to Gaza to blow themselves up. I know of dozens or hundreds of Palestinians who travel to Israel to blow themselves up.

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You’re unaware of any Israelis intentionally killing Palestinian civilians?

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The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is necessary. It is the only moral path forward. The alternatives are either a forever war or a genocide. I would think anyone with half a brain realizes that ethnic cleansing is a win-win in this scenario.

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Jan 15·edited Jan 15

Biden retains the support, perhaps even the love, of Israelis as long as he has their back against a world more and more turning against them. He stands to lose that support if he puts pressure on them to wrap things up and move toward a post-war Gaza solution that may demand things of Israel they don't want to, or feel they have to, fulfill.

Yet Israel *needs* the US to force them to wrap things up and accept a suboptimal outcome. Israel attacked Hamas and Gaza as much out of blind rage and anger at anything. The hurt of Oct. 7 was so deep, so intolerable, that all they could think of was inflicting pain on their enemy. They are so wrapped in their pain that taking a moment to even think about the less guilty (and often totally innocent) victims in Gaza is something they're not emotionally prepared to face. They haven't killed Gazan women and children; Hamas did so by their cruel use of them as shields, as if 2000 lb bombs care if they're shields or not.

And so they have no idea how this ends. There is no place for rational thought and planning, because that admits the need for making compromises. And that is not compatible with the overwhelming desire to punish.

And so at some point, they *need* Biden to force their hand. And they'll despise him for it, I fear.

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Good post. The post WW2 order had its problems, but what might come is worse.

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Realistically, the Post-WW2 liberal-international order was based on, beneath the rhetoric, raw power (and the US frequently violated the liberal-international order during the Cold War and afterwards. If the Post-WW2 liberal-international order collapses, it won't be because Gazans end up expelled from Gaza (if that, in fact happens), it will be because the US and its European allies lack the will or power (in the face of a rising China and belligerent, but not ideologically oppositional [in the way that the Soviet Union was], Russia) to maintain it.

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