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Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict. I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better; in particular, I wonder if there are arguments for the Israeli position in the current war that don't mostly rest on one of the following:
An arbitrary cutoff of historical reckoning either shortly before the most recent Hamas attack, or else somewhere in the early '90s following the general Western mode of thinking about other geopolitical conflicts. Unilaterally declaring all scores settled is not a persuasive or universalizable moral principle.
Invocation of inherent superior qualities of Israeli Jews relative to Palestinians, be it intelligence, education or general "civilizedness". You would almost certainly either need to cut out a very contrived set of conditions to make the principle only apply to this case, or accept some hypothetical corollary you probably don't want that involves similar abuse being heaped on morally/intellectually/civilizationally inferior people that you care about or feel kinship to.
The way I see it, the moral case for Palestine is pretty clear, and unlike some seem to assume does not require you to subscribe to a lot of oppressed-are-always-right slave morality (though you do need to stop short of maximally might-makes-right master morality). The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves. I do not think that Palestinians' stupidity or backwardness or whatever are so great that they can't be afforded what we otherwise consider basic human rights to property and safety, even if the people who want to take those from them for themselves were all literal Von Neumanns.
I don't think that this original wrong has been made right to the Palestinians, and the argument that some Palestinians submitted and got to live better lives under the Israelis than they would have had in an independent Palestine does not morally convince me either. If Bill Gates steals the plots some rednecks built their houses on, builds a mansion in its place and then offers them lavish jobs as domestic servants, do the ones who don't accept forfeit their right to complain about the theft? Another counterargument seems to rest on something like statute of limitations (like, the Palestinians and Israelis alive nowadays are not the ones who got robbed and their robbers), which would be more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding, and there weren't still Palestinians who are quite directly being made to suffer at the hands of the Israeli men with guns for no other reason than that they do not accept the "become Bill Gates's domestic servant" deal. It seems pretty clear to me that there is no recourse left to the Palestinians who do not want to to take this deal that preserves their human dignity - their conquerors certainly won't hear them out themselves, and they are backed by the US machine which not only could produce a personal cruise missile for every Palestinian if it put its mind to it but also has enough intellectual and propaganda firepower that they could make even the Palestinians doubt that they are themselves humans with rights.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed. (If you have been driven out of your house and into a corner at gunpoint by the mafia, the mafia boss's kid stands by watching the show and mocking you, and, seeing an opening, you shoot the kid, I will find it hard to fault you for the murder even though the kid is technically innocent of the misfortunes that befell you and this did absolutely nothing to help your situation. As a bonus, the corrupt police (my country) is then called in to arrest you, after sharing a smoke with the mafiosi.)
Though I said that the moral case for Palestine is clear, this is emphatically not to say that I rule out the possibility of a clear moral case for Israel existing at the same time. "They're both justified to continue murdering each other" is a sad reality of a lot of tribal conflict. However, in this particular case, I actually do not even see that case, or at least what I have seen seems much weaker to me, given that Israelis still have the option to leave Israel at any time as a large part of the world would welcome them with open arms (while the anti-Palestinians like reiterating that not even other Muslim countries want to take in the Palestinians, as if that helps their case), and even though in some sense they would also then be "driven from their homes" it's not like they are usually unaware of those homes' provenance.
edit: Thanks for everyone's responses, there were certainly a lot of interesting points to think about there. I'm too overwhelmed with the volume to respond to everyone, though to the extent there were some overlaps between the points I would be grateful if you could check my answers to sibling posts.
I don't take super strong sides on the conflict. It seems to have been a game of tit for tat that the Palestinians have always kept playing despite being very bad at it.
This is not a reasonable summary of events. I'll give a slightly more broken down version from my understanding, if I got something wrong let me know and I'll probably update it:
I'm left thinking there isn't a clear "good team" here, the Palestinians did get screwed over but usually in ways where they were at least somewhat to blame. Israel's settlements in the west bank are really ridiculous and should probably be dismantled. It's true that Israel isn't giving Palestinians full autonomy in their region but this is understandable given than Palestinians are nearly constantly lobbing rockets at Israel. Israel seemed, at least before Oct 7th, to be willing to go down a de-escalatory path but the Palestinians Seem totally unwilling to walk that path instead harboring the delusion that they're going to some day expel all the Jews and take all the land.
Given this I will say I do mostly side with the Israelis. They're more western and seem to at least attempt to minimize their atrocities in a way that I don't expect the Palestinians to do. A war where Palestinians were wearing the shoes of the Israelis would be an actual Genocide.
This largely tracks my understanding, although I think the religions involved. For Jews, not only is this a safe harbor, but from the point of view of Jews, this is *The Land”. They believe Israel is a holy place given to them by God himself. For Muslim Palestinians, Al-Aqsa is a holy site in Islam, and Islam in general doesn’t have a place for themselves being ruled over by anyone who isn’t a Muslim. Add in the concept of Jihad, and they’re all in on taking back the land. There’s no way either religion can compromise here. Jews aren’t going to give up their holy land especially given what happened when Jews didn’t have a safe harbor in Israel. Palestinians aren’t giving up because they believe that this is their land that they took over and giving it up would be bad.
I never know what to do with the religious aspects. My feel is that they influence on big picture things like why the zionists picked that area in particular and they have a special part in making Jerusalem hard to make work with partition plans but most of the time when we're evaluating just resolutions it doesn't seem that important because we're analyzing it from a secular lens.
I see this as a blind spot for most of us simply because we are secular and live in a secular culture. To them, religion is a very deep very powerful personal thing. And trying to see this through a secular lens when those involved see it through the lens of religion seems like a mistake. To me, the fact that one person is catholic and another is baptist doesn’t mean much, nor does it mean much to those people. If we’d go back to the time of the reformation, this becomes the most important thing to know about them.
In MENA, religion is not just a sort of interesting thing that is just sort of one of dozens of ideas and hobbies and interests a person might have. It’s important and one of the cardinal things about how that person sees the world. And for that matter it’s a big part of how others see them and they see others.
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