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I'm not sure if I'm sentimental, I just have a hard time feeling mad at them. I also have a preference for less human suffering in the world.
It's like having trashy neighbors who loudly fight and domestic each other. I get why they're both hurt, but I'm not going over there to facilitate couples' counseling. They can spend the rest of their lives making each other miserable if they want. I'd prefer they made up so I didn't have to hear it, but it's not that annoying.
Part of me wonders if everyone would have been better off if the Isreali's had just ripped the band aid off back in the day and just straight pushed them out/completed the ethnic cleansing. The displaced Palestinians would still be salty, but they'd be a few generations into moving on by now, and they'd probably get bombed way less.
I mean, obviously, if you don't finish the job, the remnants will continue to be a problem for you. But if the only way to ensure long-term peace for Israel was complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, maybe the whole project should never have been attempted in the first place (especially over such dumb sentimental reasons as "our mythology says this is our homeland" and then hoping that the people already living there would be understanding).
Episode #1052 of "the British Empire setting up geopolitical nightmares for the world in 100 years"
The Jewish immigration to Israel began long before the British mandate. The first Allayah occurred when the area was still an Ottoman province. The British gave some support to the Jews, but the mandate administration was openly actually quite hostile to the idea of Jewish state. They were the only security council member not to recognize Israeli statehood before the War of Independence (or the Nabka as the sore losers like to call it), and cracked down pretty hard on immigration and weapons imports before 1948.
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I will in fact explicitly state my belief that ethnic cleansing ~80 years ago was the most moral option, and would have led to an integrated Palestinian cultural remnant by now that's been broken up and assimilated into all the other regions -- including Israel itself. Instead, the world's accepted that Palestine is never going anywhere, but also accepted that Palestine will never stop trying to refight the conflicts it continually loses.
You break the country and the people decisively, and you relocate the survivors, and a few generations later you have a rough peace. Otherwise, you let every single generation re-radicalize and commit gradual violent suicide against Israel (and whatever Muslim neighbors offend them that day).
I'm not sure what aspect of horseshoe theory is at play here, but I never thought this would be the topic that we both agreed on
I don't much believe in horseshoe theory, anyway. I think people are far too quick to say "oh, so you don't like the status quo? Then you're just like all these people who don't!"
There's actually a huge gulf between what the "horseshoe's ends" think, believe, and want, and tying them together is actively detrimental to understanding their motives.
While your nuanced take is true, this is a funny video
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg?si=EWKK5Cw82726FSWC
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The Israelis TRIED the Ethnic Cleansing, by offering Gaza and the West Bank back to the Egyptians and Jordan in exchange for peace! The genius of the Egyptians and Jordanians is that they REJECTED the inclusion of Gaza and West Bank into their territories and made peace anyways!
Israel could have at the tail end of its MANY wars with the Arabs just marched a division of troops through the capitals to prove decisively that their worldview was broken and that the Israelis were capable of fighting back without US support - the overwhelming bulk of Israeli equipment in 1967 was purchased French/Western European equipment, not US purchased/provided arms. The greater dynamics of cold war tensions is what caused the Arabs to cease hostilities on the recommendation of Soviet advisors, because otherwise the Arabs were continually believing that they were winning.
The Egyptians still celebrate the Yom Kippur War as a national holiday https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/172q5t3/who_really_won_the_yom_kippur_war_egypt_or_israel/ despite the evidence to the contrary and it just proves that without comprehensive defeat you can imagine you actually won even as your armies lay shattered.
Israels major achievement of peace is that the leaders of Arab nations all collectively like the money peace brings in to buy property in London and New York, and the indulgences of ostentatious consumption and degenerate whoremongering in the Gulf Arab states. The incentive for Arab leaders to wage war on Israel is much lower than the desire fermenting in their downtrodden populations, but that problem for once isn't Israels responsibility to manage or to have incited - the alliance with the Mullahs is all the fault of the Arabs themselves.
Again, Israel should just migrant fleet across the world for 4 years after sealing Jerusalem in a giant gelatinous cube. The region will fall apart entirely by itself without western intervention to keep peace, and the world will be better for it.
That's not ethnic cleansing. Rest of your post is fine, not sure how viable a gelatinous cube is, but yes, the best outcome for all is the Middle East self-destructing completely.
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Jordan and Egypt held the West Bank and Gaza respectively until 1967. The Palestinians still attacked Israel from Gaza.
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