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Notes -
There is a lot of talk right now about whether the Israel-Hamas ceasefire / hostage release deal is a good thing or not.
One thing I don't see brought up is that maybe the best thing for Israel to do would be to sign the deal, get the hostages back, and then immediately just ignore the deal and spend the next couple of years killing every Hamas member on the face of the planet.
I don't really see much downside. What would people do in the future as a result? Not trust Israel as a deal-maker? By and large, groups that would be in the position to sign a deal with Israel already either don't trust Israel or have no choice because Israel has overwhelming military force. Political entities generally do not sign peace agreements because they trust each other, they sign peace agreements because they view doing so as being better than the alternatives.
Another possible downside would be that in the future, groups would just kill Israelis instead of taking any hostages... but again, would this really be that bad for Israel? Would 10/7 have been much worse for Israel if Hamas had killed every single person that they ended up taking hostage immediately instead of taking them hostage? Well yes, for the few currently surviving hostages it would have been worse, but I figure that overall probably more Israeli lives would be saved by Israel making it clear that hostage taking is an ineffective approach than by Israel right now signing a deal that effectively signals that taking Israeli hostages has some degree of effectiveness.
Yeah, it's a good deal.
War is heavily negative sum which is why both sides usually lose. Unless victory is assured, it almost always makes sense to stop fighting rather than to pursue maximal war aims.
This is a particularly bad war. Neither side is able to win. Israel can't defeat all its enemies because whenever enemy deaths get too high, Israel loses the support of Europe and the US. And of course the Iran/Palestine coalition can't win either due to ineptness.
So without a negotiated peace, the war would just go on and on forever with Israel killing lots of its enemies but never enough to achieve victory.
Is it perfect? Is it permanent? No, of course not. But it is net positive.
It was a bad war, but what other choice did Israel have? Not retaliating or trying to get the hostages would have been politically untenable. Immediately entering negotiations for the return of the hostages would have had the effect of legitimizing hostage taking as a means of diplomacy. the only real option was to invade and hope that Hamas kept the hostages alive for leverage and wait until Hamas was sufficiently weakened to be in a position to make a deal. And that's just a deal, not necessarily a good deal.
Other choice? Accept the deal and do a prisoner exchange in return for the hostages. No war, no ICC prosecutions, no IDF members committing suicide due to the depravity of their actions, Israelis would be able to travel/holiday without worrying about getting convicted for crimes against humanity/genocide, no Hezbollah rocket campaign destroying their economy, no Houthi rocket campaign making their ports go bankrupt...
Israel refused to take the hostages back multiple times because they preferred to go in and wipe out Gaza in order to try and ethnically cleanse and then settle the territory. Itamar Ben Gvir said multiple times that he had made sure to sink any deal involving the hostages being returned, and there's a decent chance that Smotrich resigns from government because getting the hostages back isn't worth not being able to murder more Palestinians and steal their territory.
Your beliefs seem to be:
That Israel should have taken no action after October 7 accept to comply with Hamas's demands for the return of the hostages.
That Israel wants to kill or remove all 2 million people from Gaza and settle the area themselves.
Would this be accurate?
My personal belief is that Israel should adopt a single-state solution with full democracy and franchise for everyone within the borders of Israel and Palestine. As for number 1... yes, I would prefer if they negotiated a return of the hostages. It might seem like a bit of a weak response if you hatched out of an egg on October 6th and have no prior knowledge of the region, but Israel has done far more and far worse to the Palestinians in the past. It would have been better to bury the hatchet and sue for peace on October 6th, but... well, 2 is accurate. I don't think there's any real arguments against this claim given that it is the official position of many members of the Israeli government. Not only do they want to do this, they have sunk multiple deals to return the hostages in order to keep the violence and ethnic cleansing going.
But why would Israel take that deal? You want one side (the stronger side) to just give the other side everything it wants, and in fact, to do so after an incident in which thousands of its citizens were killed, tortured, and raped in the most horrific ways possible.
This would be true Christlike turning of the other cheek from Israel.
But in the real world, that never works. To fail to defend yourself only invites contempt and more aggression, which applies as much in international politics as it does on the school play yard. If Israel did what you said, they would inevitably lose their country. And I would say they deserved it. Nothing is so contemptible as a person who doesn't defend their rights.
Turn the other cheek when there is a promise of heavenly rewards. In real life continued cooperation in the face of defection just makes you a chump ripe for the taking.
The Palestinians have played the game right. Continued defection when cooperation is externally imposed by greater powers, promising violence in arabic and pleading innocence in english, lying to internal stakeholders to keep momentum going.
There are plenty of well meaning Israelis who believed that defense is itself an aggressive proposition, that opening their homes and businesses to Gazans would foster cooperation and love. Those people set up open air festivals and farming villages next to Gaza to facilitate such endeavors. For their efforts they were slaughtered and raped on livestream, to the cheering delight of the very Gazans they tried to help.
Let's grant their strategy has worked. What I'm then curious about is: why wouldn't it have been better to go even farther? Take whatever deal Clinton was trying to organize and then defect later from a stronger position?
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