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No, you're the one incapable of critical thinking or looking at consequences a few moves ahead right now. Hamas didn't do this in spite of the Israeli response, they did it to provoke the Israeli response. Hamas' end game was exactly this scenario: torpedo the Israeli-Arab rapprochement created by the Abraham Accords for another generation, so that the can gets kicked down the road another 50 years.
The reaction of much of the global public, especially the Muslim population, to the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza is not something that Israel is in a position to change. Braying like a jackass that the human terrain isn't acting rationally to your standards is as useless as politicians who complain about the voters.
The ground invasion is what Hamas wanted from the start, it's a trap. It's sad to me that so many people are so brain poisoned from watching too many Hollywood action films that they see a trap and say "Well a real hero goes in anyway and figures out a way."
No, I addressed this. Yes, their response was to kill as many civilians as possible in Israel to start a conflict, not caring at all how it negatively affects the people they supposedly govern since they don't care about governing or civilians. This is because they are Islamists and religious extremists who can't be reasoned with, which is why they all have to die if any peace is possible. Any cease fire gives them exactly what they want. The only possible way they they "win" is because Israel isn't allowed to finish the job because of Western leftists crying about a cease fire that kicks the can down the road 5-10 years. They need to all be killed so their gambit fails and they realize if they pull this shit again they all die and their city will be destroyed. This would also be true if a secular Palestinian government was in power and Israel disappeared off the map.
The "trap" is to stop now and slowly turn the West against Israel while allowing Hamas to stay in power. This is what Hamas actually wants, not to be eradicated off this earth permanently.
This isn't really a good way of putting it. Hamas and the citizens of Gaza actually do read the international news and some of them even speak hebrew - which means that they understand what it means when Netanyahu holds up funny little maps that show Palestine not existing at all. Israel is very explicitly an ethnonationalist country that exists for the sake of the jewish people, and that has some very obvious connotations when they present maps which show Israel completely swallowing up Palestine!
Why should Hamas care about what happens to their population when doing nothing and accepting the status quo proposed by the Israelis means that they're all gone anyway? The Israelis are right there in the public eye letting them know that accepting a diplomatic solution means either their extermination or their permanent expulsion from the lands they've lived in for thousands of years. What's their motive to just give in and accept a slow death?
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Having dealt with Islamic extremists in person before, this is just not true. They aren't brainless automatons. They have a specific belief system, and can be negotiated and reasoned with. Ironically Israel proves this all the time when they negotiate with them. Just like everyone else they are subject to peer pressure, fear, and everything else. They are not intractable problem. Though they are a difficult one.
One of the biggest mistakes people tend to make is not understanding that.
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Al Qaeda thought they were setting a trap for the West with 9/11. Now, Bin Laden and his contemporary lieutenants are dead and Al Qaeda is scattered and broken, fighting over scraps in sub-Saharan Africa, and the West is mostly annoyed that it had to spend the time and money to do that to them.
Sometimes, it really does work out that the 'hero' goes in anyway and figures things out just fine. Provided the Biden administration doesn't knuckle under to its Left flank and start applying real pressure to get Israel to stop, Hamas is going to be crushed in the ground invasion and Israel will re-occupy the Gaza Strip, probably eventually handing over (Non-democratic) control to the PA.
https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-takeover-anniversary-explainer-10711b53a73638f46f2eb534b15b1a63
And yet...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_terrorism_in_Europe
This list seems to have entries running all the way up to 2021.
Did you know that Osama Bin Laden, no bullshit, was a big Asimov fan? And that one way to translate "The Foundation" into Arabic is "Al-Qaeda?"
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Al Qaeda lost, but the idiotic heroism here also lost. Aside from the economic and human costs, we spent two decades with our energies focused on fighting illiterate goat herders and incels instead of countering the actual threats to a US-led world order.
A tiny portion of our energies, maybe. It's not like these things are mutually exclusive.
Of course, a huge part of that was that the American people didn't really care, at the end of the day, once Bin Laden was dead. Israelis will care about what happens in the Gaza Strip.
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the human terrain does act rationally, historically, when smalltime warlords make contact with the empire. fight and everyone dies, or submit and live. "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." and the palestinians are not the neutral melians.
if they're astute enough to make moves for the reasons you suggest that's worse, they have no excuse to not know they have no realpolitik win condition. they kill a few jews and get bombed in response, some win. their dream scenario of a land push victory that kills a lot of jews ends with every nuke israel has and 100 million dead arabs.
the greater their intelligence as actors then the necessarily more irrationally-driven-by-jew-hate. you can't beat israel. if as a people they were actually smart they'd start cutting their sleeping leaders' throats. but they don't. supposing israel has some hand in supplying and motivating their own quasi-insurgency is also farcical, i see no reason to doubt israel would take final peace without further bloodshed, and i am left, especially if they possess the faculties you give them, with seeing people of such hate they would rather murder jews than live in a functioning state.
blowback risks? nah. the cause of blowback isn't brutality, it's not enough brutality. there's not a 21st century solution to peace in the middle east. it could be decades, but israel is eventually going to stop listening to outside complaining and start responding to terrorism with wildly disproportionate force. when their neighbors know a single guy sneaking into a house will result in a dozen sorties per dead kid and there isn't a power in the world who can get israel to stop, then there will be peace.
right, the point: pleading for israel to stop almost assuredly causes more deaths, not less.
Why are all your previous posts properly capitalized and this one written in ironic all-lowercase? I find this such an annoying way of typing that I couldn't even read your post all the way through.
idiosyncrasy
I've actually grown tired of it, but I've been dealing with some monster writer's block lately and was hoping the "looser" nocaps would help get the ball rolling again.
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There is a realpolitik solution though, which is to redraw borders and separate IL and PA into two contiguous viable states. Even if this will not assuage Palestinian seething, a clear international border would be a lot easier for IL to defend and a lot harder for PA to violate than the current situation where IL is the warden and PA is the inmate in a cramped open-air prison but for the sake of appearances they have to pretend it is not quite so, and also IL wants to seize half of PA's cell to extend his break room. The problem with this solution was that it would probably entail some territorial concessions from IL, and also shut down their real agenda which is to gradually seize any remaining worthwhile PA-held land and squeeze them out or provoke them into self-destructing. This is a hard sell as long as IL knows that it enjoys unconditional support from the Western world when push comes to shove, and in that light the PA strategy of provoking IL into visible atrocities now seems as good as any (as it seems like one of the moves that have better chance to compromise the unconditional support).
Toothless "pleading" for IL to stop might indeed just result in continuation of the status quo and many more violent deaths over the next century (but taken to its extreme, this argument might just as well be fielded for something like "fine, I guess we can let them literally genocide all that is left of PA, it's clear that we can't stop it anyway and the sooner they all die the fewer future people will be born to cause more deaths"), but "pleading" that is backed with "...or we may lose our next election to Ilhan Omar/the AfD/??? and then you will truly be on your own" may bring about the two-state solution.
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