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Pre 10/7, Palestinian hard-liners found themselves being abandoned by their long term backers with no realistic path forward. Free Palestine on the western left was becoming a really niche bumper sticker, like Free Tibet or Zapatista tier. Arab powers were showing a willingness to make peace with Israel without reference to Palestine or even the Arab population of Israel. The Abraham Accords were a major step towards permanent defeat of the Palestinian cause. Israel was looking like a normal country with a thriving economy and no problems which would keep international investors out.
The goal of 10/7 realistically was to reopen the conflct, draw Israel into fighting, denormalize Israeli life and economics, isolate Israel on the international stage. At some point you've maxed out the effectiveness of using dead babies for propaganda, and further dead babies have a diminishing marginal return. And at some point, the destruction wrought onto Gaza is net negative for Hamas, the loss of life undermines their ability to govern and rebuild.
So at some number of dead kids and world outrage, they'll cash out and make peace-noises.
The only realistic solution that doesn't involve ethnic cleansing is one state, or effectively one state, containing most of the current populations. How one achieves that without destroying what makes Israel worthwhile is the problem.
Israel's already got a fairly sizeable Arabic population. Of course, adding the Palestinians on top of that and retaining democracy and what makes Israel a successful state is difficult, but even a literal apartheid in terms of voting rights would still likely produce better economic and lifestyle outcomes for the average Palestinian Arab Israeli than the current status quo.
Yes, at least until they got tired of the apartheid, agitated for full voting rights, got the "international community" including the US to support them, and took over. At that point your best case is South Africa.
Even without apartheid jews would be in control of the state institutions for decades, decent treatment would be enough to keep non-jewish citizens in check, time would do the rest. Problem is that jews want their state jewish.
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And to note, even blacks in South Africa are much better off than in most of the rest of the continent- see the economic migration there(which has been going on for SA’s entire history).
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