My political awareness was forged by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the American response.
The core lesson: the point of a terrorist attack is to trigger an over reaction. America wildly over reacted and became fundamentally hostile to Arab and Muslim people.
This reaction led to some of the most successful recruiting of radicals in generations.
Israel's response to this crisis seems to have failed to learn from that mistake.
Israel's response tends to stem from a history of oppression which is where it gets touchy. Jewish have not exactly been treated well for most of the 20th century. Not saying that is a reason to invoke that upon someone else, but it tends to be where most thoughts come from. A sense of if we don't do something we'll lose "our" home.
That’s an interesting parallel, Gazan’s response is also borne of a history of oppression. Living with food insecurity, being an intergenerational refugee unable to return to home a few miles away, watching family members harmed, etc seems to motivate a lot of Palestinian behavior.
"being an intergenerational refugee" is one of the most absurd problems that exist in this conflict. Nobody should be a refugee just because their grandparents were. They should be plain citizens of whatever region they were born in.
If we extrapolate this stance to other past conflicts, we'd have today tens of millions of German "intergenerational" refugees sitting in Germany and waiting for their return to their home a few miles away, across the Oder river.
The idea that every nation needs a state (and every state exists to serve one nation) is part of the absurdity! It's what got us into this mess in the first place—the Jews needed a state of their own because the rest of us couldn't stand to let them make their home near us.
The problem of intergenerational refugees will not be solved by carving out a new state and shipping everyone back there.
Their ancestors lost their homes when they needlessly started, and then lost, a war against people who owned land outright and others who moved onto the land only after the UN divided it and gave a vast proportion of it to Jordan, and part to Israel… ancestors who also abandoned their land after the war defeat on the advice of their warlike leaders. The ones who stayed behind became Israeli (Arab muslims, Christians, etc.) and kept their land as long as they held valid documented title to it, and many of those who made that move (or whose parents did) say they would prefer to live under Israeli rule versus PA rule. The Youtuber TravelinIsrael has some good videos on history about this.
Obviously there are also modern alleged losses of land and homes but each case has its own details. In some, Israelis (often settlers) are clearly in the wrong, but in others, it is less clear and more disputed than common rhetoric about “oppression” and “occupation” would imply.
> moved onto the land only after the UN divided it
Why should people who have lived in an area for generations heed the dictates of nations thousands of miles away?
> ancestors who also abandoned their land after the war defeat on the advice of their warlike leaders.
This is a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened. A full accounting won't fit in an HN comment, but it's beyond question that many Palestinians were expelled at gunpoint from homes they had been living in for generations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_fro...
Personally, I would recommend the series "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem" [0]. The guy behind it is a former US DoD contractor who worked for many years with the IDF, friends with Israeli soldiers, etc, but who is also married to a woman with Palestinian relatives. It's extremely well-researched, and explains the motivations of all the players without exculpating any side.
> beyond question that many Palestinians were expelled at gunpoint from homes
You'd surprised how many out right reject this ever happened, including some prominent "Zionists" in tech. There's some alternate reality that some of us were simply not part of, but yet find ourselves with them in this shared reality.
It's a matter of public record and well articulated by Ilan Pappé at the very least, that the Zionists were intent on capturing Palestine for themselves and removing everyone they could by any means necessary. If they could buy out the properties they would, but as they faced mounting resistance they resorted to violence. Ben-Gurion and his ilk were criminals even if lionized
On the other hand, I prefer that to someone who just pretends to be even handed.
For the record, I listen to the viewpoints of plenty of people on the other side, as well. But I'm afraid I find their narrative doesn't hang together.
I would recommend again the series I linked in my previous comment. The series creator says at one point, that had he been born a Jew, he would have been a hardcore Zionist; conversely, had he been born a Palestinian, he would have been a hardcore supporter of that side. One of the things the series does so well is, instead of presenting the history as a debate between two camps that needs to have a winner and loser, it tells the story. For all the major players in the story, it tells you not only what they did, but why they did it, and how they came to believe what they believe. And then it asks you what you would have done in their situation. After you've stared that question in the face, it's impossible to really hate either side IMO.
It's a long series, many hours of listening, but absolutely worth every second. Hooked me from the first few minutes. You won't regret it!
You are correct, in addition to those who decided to abandon their land, there are others who were expelled because their side started a war they lost, in which Israel captured vast amounts of territory, and expelled people on the losing side from that territory in some cases. As you yourself said, a full accounting won't fit; there's a lot more that can be said about history here.
The podcast person married into a Palestinian family thinks that Israel's founding consisted of Jews coming from Europe. Certainly many Jews came from Europe but many already lived in their homeland of Israel decades or more before modern Israel was founded, and many tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands came from nearby Arab countries, where true actual genocide against them was underway and was carried through (you can count the results today in the demographics of nearby countries as compared to prior to the many pograms). Golda Meir herself was Palestinian.
There are flaws on both sides. But I'll take the side who doesn't r**e with family members cheering them on. Sickening. Of course, saying that they haven't had an easy time would be a huge understatement. Some of it is self inflicted, starting wars and conflicts, but they also have been lied to about the most fundamental things, and about history. And so I would take everything in that podcast with a grain of salt, especially given that it only took reading the summary of Episode 1 to find wild distortions.
"Their ancestors lost their homes when they needlessly started, and then lost, a war" - the Palestinian villagers did not start any wars - the war was started by the rulers of neighboring states...
That explains what happened in 50s and 60s. Leveling Gaza in 2023 doesn't fall in that category, Hamas never had the power to do anything about Israel's existence as a state.
From the perspective of Israel's defense forces, Hamas doesn't have that power because Israel responds the way it does. I'd imagine that for many in Israel the lesson of the 60s is that if given an opening all of their neighbors will attack, so Israel cannot ever be seen as responding lukewarmly to an attack, even one by a party that couldn't destroy them singlehandedly.
(I'm not arguing that this position is correct, just trying to explain another possible perspective.)
That's the problem, isn't it? If you put yourself in the shoes of either side, you can see how they have very good reason to do what they do (except Israelian settlement policies, those basically amount to borderline ethnic cleansing, and force the IDF to move in after the fact, but that's a different beast).
And since both sides are "right", there is no way this can end without outside intervention. An intervention that won't come, becaues nobody who could intervene is neutral enough, nor willing to be drawn into this.
I disagree. Palestinian terrorism is objectively counterproductive and driven by unreasonable domestic politics, not reasonable geopolitics.
You can't be a successful politician in Palestine with a position of "lets make concessions to Israel so we can stop suffering." The only successful politicians for the past 60-odd years have been the ones promising to fight Israel and get the Palestinians their stuff back.
The problem is that Palestine as a state has no military, economic, cultural or geopolitical bargaining chips to get their stuff back.
That means every successful Palestinian politician is elected with a mandate to "get our stuff back" but without the means to do it. So they have two options: either make concessions to get some stuff back, or try to fight.
If they make concessions, they lose their grip on power to the groups saying "Those guys are giving away stuff to Israel! We'll get your stuff back!"
If they try to fight a conventional war they lose in a matter of weeks (evidently.) So their only option is to fight just enough that their constituents are convinced they're doing a good job, but not so much that Israel wipes them out. Hence, the 60-year history of terrorism and targeting civilians.
In conclusion:
Palestinians need to make concessions for peace so that they can accumulate the bargaining chips they need to get their stuff back from Israel. They are not doing that because the Palestinian people will not support any leaders that pursue that strategy; they believe violence is a viable means of getting their stuff back even though that has been factually incorrect for the past 60 years. It is possible that the geopolitical landscape may change in the future, and violence becomes a viable option, but wasting resources on fruitless wars does not help change it.
Therefore it is not true that both sides have very good reasons to do what they do.
The armed struggle hasn't done them any favours, yes. Neither has peace (Oslo).
> The problem is that Palestine as a state has no military, economic, cultural or geopolitical bargaining chips to get their stuff back.
Hamas agreed to 1967 borders back in 2017. PLO has long given up armed struggle.
> If they make concessions, they lose their grip on power to the groups saying "Those guys are giving away stuff to Israel! We'll get your stuff back!"
A typical racist characterisation.
Arab male or female is continually fair game to either poke fun at, or more seriously, be confined to and judged by a representation that is either inherently bad, angry, irrational or stupid, misogynistic or repressed, exotic or lascivious.
The peace was immediately undermined by groups who did not want to stop fighting. Look, the wikipedia article on the 1996 palestinian general election following the accords literally says, quote:
The Islamist Hamas, Fatah's main rival, refused to participate in the election; they felt that doing so would lend legitimacy to the PNA, which was created out of *what they called unacceptable negotiations and compromises with Israel.* [0]
> ["Those guys are giving away stuff to Israel! We'll get your stuff back!" is] A typical racist characterisation.
This is well documented history, see above for one such example. I know there are people out there who think we actually have an obligation to alter historical facts to avoid coming to uncomfortable conclusions, but I am not interested in debating that view here, if an honest accounting of the facts makes me racist in your eyes, so be it.
> You make it sound like Palestinians want war in perpetuity. Such a hateful rhetoric.
Of course not, they want their stuff back. I'm pointing out that they have consistently chosen a way of going about it that is actually preventing them from getting what they want.
Again, this is based purely on the actual history of the past 60 years where every Palestinian government has reverted to allowing anti-Israel violence because the public will not allow criticism of the fight to get their stuff back. As an example, the PA of today had to walk back its criticism of Hamas' Oct 7 attack after public backlash [1]
Who wouldn't? You make it sound like this is unreasonable. Last I checked, '67 borders, reparations, and a right of return for some small percentage of the refugees, and they are good?
> the PA of today had to walk back its criticism of Hamas' Oct 7 attack after public backlash
If one were in Pal shoes, pretty sure they'd hate an occupying force with all their might. This Haaretz article explains their possible psychological state after close to 3 decades of humiliation: https://archive.is/rLq02
I'm not saying Israel is blameless. But you must recall Bibi was literally elected because Palestinians began a wave of suicide bombings right before the Israeli elections, which swayed their electorate towards a hard-liner. I.e. the violent Palestinian groups could not be controlled by the peaceful-er ones, and their terrorism ended up being counter-productive.
> Who wouldn't? You make it sound like this is unreasonable.
I am making no value judgements about their goals. I am asserting that their method for achieving those goals is not rational insofar as it is counterproductive.
> pretty sure they'd hate an occupying force with all their might
Being really emotional doesn't make your decisions rational. I'm not telling Palestinians to love their enemies. I'm telling them to pick their battles and not take losing fights.
> I'm not saying Israel is blameless. But you must recall Bibi was literally elected...
Agree, and his 2 decades led to apartheid, continued violation of Oslo, and flirting dangerously with the Temple Mount status quo... culminating in 7 Oct. Which is why I pointed out it was wrong to call out Pals as unreasonable and irrational (a typical stereotype, co-opted by the IDF https://archive.is/P4PyJ) when the fault is with both the sides.
(The Jordanian King shouldn't have endorsed Bibi at the time he did, which apparently tipped polls in his favour against Peres)
> asserting that their method for achieving those goals... I'm telling them to pick their battles and not take losing fights
True. The reason why Israeli far-right loves propping up Hamas. The extremists on the either side feed on each other. Remains to be seen what comes after the current situation. Sincerely hope 67 borders and it is done. Have a feeling West Bank and E Jerusalem settlers and their billionaire American donors won't like it.
And then there was Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who actually wanted peace. He was assassinated. Guess what, the assassins were right wing Israelis and not Palatinians or Hamas.
Whether the Israeli's decisions are reasonable is a completely separate topic, and I think the answer is less clear.
Because Palestine has no bargaining chips, a peace deal will involve Israel making unilateral concessions to Palestine, i.e. charity. Israel will relinquish territory where it currently is the de-facto owner, and agree to put new limits on its treatment of the Palestinians. Palestine will continue to receive a great deal of international aid which it could use to rebuild quite quickly if at peace, and they could easily choose to rebuild into a more credible threat to Israel.
In exchange, Israel gets:
Maybe improved relations with their Arab neighbors. (It could also make things worse; their neighbors may become more openly hostile if their "arm the Palestinians against Israel" strategy is taken off the table)
Slightly improved international relations because the settlements Israel keeps would be legitimized.
Maybe a reduction in terrorism (assuming the Palestinian peace-making faction retains enough power to enforce this).
Maybe a reduction in defense costs (Israel still needs to maintain a large defense force because it is surrounded by potentially hostile countries).
Is that trade worth it for Israel? Its not obvious, and depends on how likely you think the positive outcomes are. This is reflected in their domestic politics, Israelis have supported both doves and hawks over the past 60 years depending on how likely they think a positive peace is, which largely depended on Palestinian behavior.
So while I don't think its worth assassinating people over, I do think reasonable people can come to different conclusions about the appropriateness of peace deals from the Israeli perspective.
I saw an interview a while ago of an Israeli father who lost his kid in one of the previous wars, and who now works a Palestinian father, who also lost his kid, in order to find a peaceful solution. He confirmed your point by saying, I paraphrase, "we are doomed to live share this land together, or the graveyard under it".
I really, really hope it will be tze "cheely" solution, the alternatives are, unfortunately, very much imaginable and incredibly painful and ugly.
Sadly, both have to be willing to forgive for option 3 to work, so even if one side would be willing to, they are stuck unless the other side is also willing.
I think that what’s going on in the minds of those calling the shots on Israel’s side (or at least most of them) is: they’re not trying to level Gaza. They’re trying to fight a war against Hamas, and Hamas is fighting from positions in cities that are often literally on the grounds of or inside what ought to be protected civilian sites: hospitals, mosques, etc. And they are surely making what seems a straightforward tactical calculation: they could send infantry in to try to minimize civilian casualties at enormous cost to their infantry, or they could use their massively superior firepower to just destroy the Hamas positions from a distance.
And the Israeli command feels the need to fight on the ground in the first place because Hamas is holding obviously innocent hostages and shooting militarily-useless but nonetheless quite dangerous explosive-filled rockets over the border. Hamas is goading them very effectively. If Israel could magically snap its fingers to destroy Hamas, get rid of all of Hamas’ weapons, and leave Gazan civilians, buildings and infrastructure alone, of course they would!
One might ask why Hamas is doing any of the above. I don’t think Hamas is at all on the side of the residents of Gaza. Their strategy seems much better explained by some rather different goals: improving their own status in the world, raising money, making a really big show, weakening Israel, seeming and feeling important, and recruiting more militant members. I think that every Gazan civilian injury and death is in Hamas’ favor. Israel making itself look bad is in Hamas’ favor. More Gazans who hate Israel and feel hopeless and marginalized is in Hamas’ favor. So of course Hamas wants to keep holding hostages and randomly blowing stuff up in Israel.
To be clear: I do not think Israel is making an ethically or strategically appropriate decision here. But I understand where they’re coming from.
And I don’t think Hamas is making the right decisions either, ethically or strategically, at least if the goal is making a good, safe life for residents of Gaza.
Politically, Hamas has something in common with Nethanyahus government: the urge to stay in power. From that perspective, at least for now, both sides, Israels politicak leadership and Hamas leadership, have achieved their goal.
Another thing both have in common: they don't give a fuck about the price other people have to pay in order to achieve that goal.
Not sure what that has to do with it. The current conflict between Palsetinians and Israel roots back to the foubdation of Israel as a state after WW2. Which I get, jews came pretty close to extinction, and arguably not a lot of people actually cared about that. Hence the need for a state of their own.
80 years and a bunch of wars, insurgencies, counter-insurgencies, terror and air campaigns later, interseded with a handful of peace initiatives, the situation is truely FUBAR. I am not convinced so that leveling Gaza actually does a lot to solve that problem.
If the UN was a properly working organization, it would have intervened long ago to force a ceasefire. But we all know that only applies to very poor countries with no economic or political relevance.
I am sad and angry that the US was the sole vetoer of the most recent attempt. Also sad that Israel's vengeful assault on the people of Gaza is enabled and funded by the US.
To misquote Bryan Cantrill, one should not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Netanyahu.
When a nationalist politician like him is faced with an event like this, long-term international diplomacy considerations barely enter the picture.
The violence just comforted him in his previous worldviews, all he saw was that his nationalistic policies were justified and the only viable answer was to be even more of a nationalist.
I don't see any reality where he didn't have the most violent response he could get away with.
If there as an election tomorrow in Israel, do you think the new leader would be against war? Like it or not, Hamas' actions have prompted a response from the Israeli people, a different leader wouldn't change that sentiment.
True, Israeli votes are the only votes that have had, and can have, any material effect there. They have voted for Netanyahu reliably for years, so the present situation, Hamas included, is what they have, collectively, chosen. Hamas has always been Netanyahu's staunchest political ally. If Israeli voters ever choose differently, change might be possible. Until then, things will be reliably more of the same.
Netanyahu has in fact won less than 50% of the votes but due to a technicality managed to assemble a coalition with other parties that amounted to 64 of 120 seats in parliament (similar to Bush Jr. and Trump having won US elections despite winning less than 50% of the votes due to the electoral college). The latest polls show Netanyahu and his government with a less than 30% approval rating, this was hardly a slam dunk victory (and in fact Netanyahu replaced another prime minister who ruled between his terms when he barely won the November 2022 elections).
It remains the US's collective fault that Bush minor and Trump got into office on minority votes. We know how to fix the electoral system, and numerous states have chosen to implement that fix, so it just waits on a few more states to sign on.
What you say offers more hope than I had imagined possible.
Isreali-Palestinian history didn't begin on October 7th. The sentiment isn't a creation of that event, though obviously the attack influenced it. The sentiment is also partly a creation of years of right-wing politics and an ineffectual opposition.
It's an issue in many countries, as we (even on HN) throw humanitarianism away, and the study of it, we will of course lose quite a lot. What replaces it?
My political awareness was forged by participating in the Iraq war on the US side after falling for the massive propaganda before. I've literally never been the same person since, and have spent most of my waking free hours in between the jobs I can barely hold down for my PTSD trying to understand the details behind the global geopolitical situation.
The truth is this is likely just a continuation of the same playbook, and until one understands the true reasons behind the GWOT one will not be able to understand why it seems those "mistakes" haven't been learned from. When I started asking Cui Bono about Iraq (I did not participate in Afghanistan) and the various real results of the war I keep returning to Israel. For example, I know a person who was in the Green Zone when an Iraqi general came and said "I have 40k military men about to have no job, what do you want to do with them, please hire them." and the top-down directive that every boot-on-the-ground with half a brain knew would result in majorly increased chaos was to tell them to f-off! My conclusion after tons of reading is that balkanization was part of the intention as part of prepping for Oded Yinon. (I won't even start on the various secret societies (ancient mystery religions) obsession with Solomons temple and rebuilding the third temple, which would require the destruction of Al Aqsa)
Then as I started truly analyzing 9/11 and doing what the intel bubbas call "threat finance", I keep ending up at deep state actors heavily tied to Israel (and the UK) even within my (US) government. For an example that is even mirrored in this recent escalation, are indicators of pre-knowledge via trading that occurred prior. This happened on 9/11 (by a firm formerly chaired by AB Buzzy Krongard, A.B. Brown, acquired by Banker's Trust turned Banker's Trust-AB Brown) and before 10/7, and in a way that is mathematically provable to be major outliers.
My point is that there are much deeper things going on that surface analysis will fail to provide understanding for. If I went into further detail, I would for sure be seen as a "crazy conspiracy theorist"...
I riff on Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean "You'd best start believing in ghost stories, because you're in one!"
There was evidence that some folks knew of this attack and traded against it too. The official sources for the 9/11 stuff claim that the evidence for it there was circumstantial, but I still don’t believe it.
With 9/11 the 28 pages shows that the Saudis are almost certainly the ones responsible for the attack but due to oil we simply ignore it and sweep it under the rug.
The US is institutionally unable to bring those responsible for terrorism to justice.
> the point of a terrorist attack is to trigger an over reaction
I don't agree with that at all, the point of a terrorist attack is to continue a war of attrition. An overreaction is actually the worst thing that can happen to terrorists: It nullifies their attempt to win via small incremental attritional steps. The reason why the US didn't win the war against terror is because it didn't attack the core ideology that causes the terror. For example in their fight against Nazi ideology in post war Germany the US "overreacted" hard and made sure that Germany was forced to make the nazi ideology wholly illegal and every depiction of a nazi symbol in public illegal.
> US "overreacted" hard and made sure that Germany was forced to make the nazi ideology wholly illegal and every depiction of a nazi symbol in public illegal.
The US also poured a massive fortune into rebuilding the West German economy and society, to ensure it wouldn't fall to communism. Violence and repression alone would not have worked.
Israel lives by the border of Gaza, right next to the terrorists that forged the October 7th attack.
Meanwhile, the US had no border with the belligerent terrorist organization's societies (Iraq, Syria, ME).
Would the US allow a terrorist organization that both DECLARES, has CAPABILITIES to, and HAS DEMONSTRATED INTENT to harm its citizens to live by its borders, and threaten with continued assaults? hell no.
AFAIK cartel gang members by the border of US aren't taught from young age that all US citizens are demons that stole something that belongs to them, and that their goal in life is to kill as many americans as possible.
They also don't obtain and launch thousands of rockets at US cities, or go on 3,000-men raid of US cities by the border for the main objective of killing, hurting, kidnapping and instilling fear into US citizens.
The comparison of cartels to terrorist militias like Hamas is ridiculous and reveals ignorance.
As I explained in the pinned comment at the top (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616662) and my other posts in this thread, comments in this thread must not be in the spirit of battle, but rather of something more spacious within ourselves. It's not always possible to find that (for many legitimate reasons), but in that case it's best to refrain from posting until one can.
I'm afraid your comments in this thread are crossing out of that and back in to the spirit of battle. This is 100% understandable and I get it, but we need something else in this discussion.
The same goes for some of the commenters arguing against your position—my moderation point here is certainly not about agreeing with them and disagreeing with you (I add this because I know it can all too easily feel that way).
If Mexico-based cartels killed 1000 Americans and kidnapped 200, the US would send armed forces into Mexico in a heartbeat, probably with the support of the Mexican government.
Of course the cartels don't do that, though, because their goal isn't to murder Americans and destroy America.
And the US does operate closely with Mexican forces to root them out. In addition, the govt in Mexico is cooperative. If that is not the case, I think we’ll see a much more hostile response.
How? The cartels want to make money through illegal means, they don't want to destroy America. The cartels studiously avoid killing Americans. When they do kill Americans, the leadership either kills the members who killed Americans or turns them in, e.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/gulf-cartel-apologizes-...
This is a common, but very flawed misunderstanding of the situation in Israel, by analogizing it to 9/11. (Many Israelis were pushing this narrative at the start of this, btw, but that doesn't make it true.)
This wasn't just a terror attack, like 9/11 was. It was an invasion. Thousands of armed militants breached the border and invaded Israel, then killed more than a thousand Israelis. The militants were inside Israel for a few days after. In addition to the ground invasion, Hamas shot rockets into Israel, and has continues to shoot rockets at Israel this entire time.
This wasn't a terror attack. It was an invasion and a declaration of war.
In addition to all of that, for the first few weeks after this invasion, it was very unclear whether this would lead to a wider, joint attack by other forces as well. It is very hard for people in the US, and for most Westerners, to really understand what it's like to be afraid of losing a war. Israel probably would've survived even if this war turned into a combined attack by not just Hamas, but by Hezbollah and possibly even others. (Who, btw, are also shooting at Israel every day, just not doing it enough to really be considered another combatant.)
The response to 9/11 was maybe an overreaction. But 9/11 was not a real threat to the US , and this was fairly clear. This is an entirely different situation - there is a sworn enemy of Israel on its borders, proving they have the capability to kill thousands of citizens, and claiming they're going to do this over and over. That's a situation that a country can't live with, which is why Israel's reaction is not an overreaction - it's what any country on earth would do.
Notes:
1. This doesn't mean that everything Israel does is ok - there are different ways of prosecuting a war, Israel could still be doing it in a very immoral way and be consistent with everything I said above (I don't think that's true, but it's orthogonal to my point in this comment).
2. This comment also doesn't say anything about whether or not Hamas is "justified" in invading Israel, nor does it claim that "history started on October 7th" or anything silly like that. Of course there's context to this whole situation. (It should be needless to say but I'll say it anyway - there is no excuse for Hamas's deliberate targeting of civilians, and no excuse for the slaughter they committed. Still, that's also orthogonal to the point I'm making in this comment.)
> it was very unclear whether this would lead to a wider, joint attack by other forces as well
I agree that it's easy to discuss rationally from the outside.
Hamas is not a threat to Israeli existence. Without extensive and far superior outside help, Hamas could not hold a square meter of Israeli (non-Gazan) territory).
Do you have insight into why Israelis talk about an "existential" war? I'm not dismissing their feelings - WTF do I know? - but I think it goes beyond expected overreaction and the exaggerations of a few fringe figures.
(And obviously, existential or not, Israelis will not want to experience future attacks like this Oct 7.)
Israel is surrounded by nations which want to see Israel destroyed, and which have banded together in the past to attempt exactly that (e.g. the Yom Kippur War in 1973). If Israel fails to retaliate against aggression forcefully enough it could embolden the surrounding nations enough to form a new coalition and attack.
The most powerful neighbor, part of the Yom Kippur War, is Egypt, which in 1979 signed a peace treaty that nobody thinks they will violate. Jordan is a peaceful, cooperative neighbor. Lebanon is not capable but Hezbollah, in southern Lebanonon, is dangerous, of course - too dangerous for Israel to attack, probably, but to invade Israel and take territory? That is much different (and I don't know). Syria has just been through a long civil war. I'm not sure I see much potential at the moment.
Also, the US would openly fight on Israel's side.
But second, it's easy to say, 'it's probably fine' from the outside, when your neck and your future isn't at risk.
> If Israel fails to retaliate against aggression forcefully enough it could embolden the surrounding nations enough to form a new coalition and attack.
And too much force could provoke them. It's not that simple. Escalation is generally considered a bad, amateur move in international relations. The trick is to accomplish your aim (deterrence) without creating a bigger problem. That's how you end up in major wars.
> But second, it's easy to say, 'it's probably fine' from the outside, when your neck and your future isn't at risk.
Yeah this was basically going to be my response to the first part of your response. Israel wants to be around for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. You can't accept existential risk, even if small, if that's your goal.
> And too much force could provoke them. It's not that simple.
I agree. My comment was just trying to look at the question of why the initial invasion by Hamas was seen as an existential threat great enough to justify an all out counterattack. I don't know how to answer when enough is enough, and I could easily believe that Israel isn't even considering that question out of rage.
The damage to Israel's international reputation could outweigh any security it gains through deterrence - the fact that Hamas hasn't freed their hostages or stopped firing rockets suggests that they don't want Israel to stop fighting for this reason
For one, during this war Israel has been fired upon from Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, with Iran pulling many of the strings behind the scenes. The combined strength of these countries is definitely an existential threat.
Aside from that, the borders with Gaza and Lebanon are unlivable. More than 100,000 Israelis are displaced from their homes.
The international community does not care that Hamas is continuously committing war crimes, with respect to hostages, firing rockets at civilian population centers, and using human shields. They do not care that Hezbollah is violating multiple UN security council resolutions, including first and foremost 1701. They do not care that Yemen is firing cruise missiles at Israel from 1500 miles away and hijacking freighters with loose or no ties to Israel.
All the world cares about is how many rockets you need to store and how many militants you need to harbor to qualify as a legitimate target for the IDF.
> Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, with Iran pulling many of the strings behind the scenes. The combined strength of these countries is definitely an existential threat.
The only country listed that is any threat to Israel is Syria, and they haven't been on Israel's level for a long time, just went through a civil war, and can't even deter Israel from bombing Syria at will. Yemen and Iran don't have borders with Israel and have no means of fighting them.
The most serious threat is Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah's territory would be much more difficult to invade, and Hezbollah much more difficult to defeat, than Gaza and Hamas (as shown last time Israel attacked them). I don't know that Hezbollah has the capabilities to attack, take, and hold Israeli territory; I haven't seen anyone claim that.
> The international community does not care that Hamas is ...
I've seen the international community talk about it for decades, including now. I think this claim, made by other partisans too, is just a fabrication of victimhood and discredits Israel. Israel survives due to the support of the leader of the international order and most powerful country.
All reports are that Netanyahu and the Israeli intelligence services knew this attack was coming. They've been promoting Hamas over more moderate elements in Gaza. The goal was to provoke an attack which would "justify" a counter-attack to completely level Gaza and kill or force out all the remaining civilians.
While there are elements of truth to this, the reality is more nuanced. They have been promoting Hamas over moderate elements, and have looked the other way as Qatar has provided money in briefcases to Hamas. Israel ignored warnings from their own intel as well as civilians who noticed that Hamas were increasing training exercises on the border from listening to radio communications. The explicit goal of promoting Hamas was not to promote an attack, but to divide and rule the Palestinians: by showing Hamas as an example of "this is what would happen if we left the West Bank" and by exacerbating the rivalry, they used this to exert control over the Palestinian Authority.
"Releasing Palestinian prisoners, allowing cash transfers, as the Qatari envoy comes and goes to Gaza as he pleases, agreeing to the import of a broad array of goods, construction materials in particular, with the knowledge that much of the material will be designated for terrorism and not for building civilian infrastructure, increasing the number of work permits in Israel for Palestinian workers from Gaza, and more. All these developments created symbiosis between the flowering of fundamentalist terrorism and preservation of Netanyahu’s rule."
The idea that these points prove that Netanyahu purposefully bolstered Hamas is tenuous at best.
That is not what the reports say. They certainly indicate some intelligence failures, unclear whether in the intelligence services themselves or in the way the reports were handled. But there's a huge difference between "we knew this attack was going to happen and let it happen" vs. "we made a mistake here".
And also worth noting, there's internal Israeli politics involved in all these reports - Netanyahu wants to show that the failure was on the military/intelligence side and not on his side.
It is completely baseless to claim that Israel knew about the attack and let it happen - no serious person is suggesting that.
Israel's early support of Hamas is no secret, they saw Hamas as a religious Islamist counterweight to the secular leftist PLO and explicitly funded them to divide Palestinian opinion. [1] Also no longer a secret is the fact that Netanyahu explicitly allowed other Arab governments to smuggle money to Hamas. [2] And the intelligence failures leave a lot of questions open, especially given the advanced state of the Israeli intelligence apparatus (Gazan are forced to be limited to 2G so they can be spied on easily). [3]
The only weak conspiracy theory here is that Israel explicitly let the attack happen, rather than the reality that they took unnecessary risks to achieve fascistic political aims that opened the possibility of retaliation.
The core lesson: the point of a terrorist attack is to trigger an over reaction. America wildly over reacted and became fundamentally hostile to Arab and Muslim people.
This reaction led to some of the most successful recruiting of radicals in generations.
Israel's response to this crisis seems to have failed to learn from that mistake.