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I feel like I'm losing my mind here. You have Hamas commanders (Yahya Sinwar among them) openly stating that the purpose of the October 7th attacks was to escalate the conflict by provoking Israel into a more aggressive response than they had thitherto been using. You had some of these fine gentlemen explicitly contemplating the possibility that the October 7th attacks might be so gruesome and horrific that Israel would use nuclear weapons in response. And yet you still refuse to assign any moral responsibility for the escalation in hostilities to Hamas. Everything is ultimately Israel's fault, because of something something 1948 right of return.
This seems like a tremendous example of the hypoagentic framing I was complaining about in the OP.
But how about I propose some admittedly arbitrary cutoffs to demonstrate that the October 7th attacks represented a major discontinuity in the conflict up to that point in 2023:
Do you dispute any of these figures?
This also illustrates why your invocation of the 71k figure is a cheat. Israel did not kill 71k Palestinians all at once, but over the course of three years, during which they sustained considerable casualties of their own.
Can you show me where you think I said they have no moral responsibility? Of course they do; both parties do in an escalation spiral. I just think the Israelis have more, while it seems to me that you, in your attempts to frame the story as a simple "the Palestinians started it", think they have none.
I do think that, in a very basic sense, the Israelis do have more agency, because to begin with, unlike the Palestinians they have a very plausible option to simply abandon their project of conquest and gtfo. If they used a fraction of the lobbying power that they have accumulated, they could secure citizenship in a rich Western country of their choosing for every one of their people, generous starting package of funds included.
I dispute that how many days the killing was spread out over is particularly relevant.
I thought I replied to this but it seems my internet connection was spotty.
You know, even leaving aside the logistics associated with securing foreign citizenship for 7 million people (9 million if you include the Arabs) and uprooting them from their homes – I think it only requires a very cursory understanding of the last nine decades of European history to appreciate why Jews might be reluctant to put themselves at the mercy of one or more Western governments. "Fool me once" etc.
It's this constant two-step with Jew-haters. They order the Jews to leave the Middle East and move to Europe or the US where they belong – then as soon as they do so, they start complaining about how many Jews there are in Europe or the US. Someone on Substack noted that Europeans spent well over a millennium ordering Jews in Europe to go back where they came from (and inciting the occasional pogrom to underline their point) – but as soon as the Jews did so, these same people still weren't happy and immediately began accusing them of founding an illegitimate genocidal settler-colonial state. (Curiously, it's usually the only state they so characterise, and the only state whose name is followed by the slogan "does not have a right to exist". Wow, what a crazy coincidence huh? The only state that doesn't have a right to exist is the one meant to be a safe haven for Jews? Who'da thunk it?) Wherever Jews go, Jew-haters aren't happy and wish they'd go somewhere else. Sometimes I wish Jew-haters would be honest and admit that the place they want Jews to live is not Israel or Madagascar or Europe or the US, but simply "nowhere".
Yes, I'm invoking the memory of the Holocaust to explain why Jews are uncomfortable about the prospect of abandoning their national self-determination project and leaving themselves at the mercy of Western governments who might turn on them and scapegoat them at any time. Maybe you'll say that's tasteless and unfair, that nothing like that Holocaust will ever recur and that Western Gentiles have learned their lesson. But have they, really? In most Western countries, antisemitic hate crimes are one of the most common kind per capita (cue the Joo-posters saying that these hate crimes are an understandable response to Israel's "genocide" in Gaza, a logic they conspicuously do not apply to hate crimes targeting Muslims). A significant proportion of Westerners deny that the Holocaust ever happened, or think it's been greatly exaggerated, and the proportion tends to be higher among young people than old (how can you learn the lessons of something you don't think took place?). There was a mass exodus of Jews from Poland beginning in the sixties in response to persistent ostracisation and scapegoating, with government leaders blaming things that went wrong in Poland on "Zionists" (wink wink nudge nudge). In your honest opinion, has the modal Pole become more or less friendly to Jews in the intervening six decades? And perhaps the most frightening thing is, this phenomenon is not restricted to Westerners of a particular political persuasion. Jew-hatred is a pathology which transcends ideology. Jews are blamed both for rapacious capitalism and surreptitious socialism. There is simply no Western political block that Jews can reasonably trust to be anything more than temporary allies of convenience.
"Abandon the country you spent the better part of a century building and scatter its citizens to the winds, to be left at the mercy of governments who barely even pretend not to despise them" is not a serious proposal. It is either the product of staggering naiveté, or a proposal made in bad faith.
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The fact that, in your first reply to me, you described the October 7th attacks as having "happened", the exact kind of evasive euphemistic language I decried in the OP.
You used "happened" yourself in your post, when you said "get them to concede ... the October 7th attacks happened". This is because this turn of phrase is natural in English, and you are trying to make a lot of tea from very little leaf there. I have no problem with the wording "Hamas performed, fully agentically, the Oct 7th attacks", nor would I take any issue with the converse "the levelling of Gaza happened"! Not every random stylistic choice has to be a dog whistle for whatever proves your grand theory.
Fair enough, mea culpa.
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I don't think that's a reasonable alternative in any way.
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