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The following is a comment about US media, not about the war in Gaza.
Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.
I'm not shocked that Hamas doesn't surrender, but I am shocked that the option is never even mentioned in passing by the talking heads. Do they not think of it? Is it too far outside the bounds of normal discourse? If this were any other military conflict in all of history, it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.
Intellectual honesty is a well-defined and commonly used term. I think "intellectual bravery" should be part of that arsenal as well.
In simple terms, the willingness to think about the unthinkable and speak about the unspeakable. To actually "go there". And by this I don't mean to think about killing all Palestinians, but more so to ask "So what happens if Israel stops now?". You, me and the talking heads and the people in the halls of power all know the answer to that question. The answer being that Palestinians will forever continue to launch terrorist attacks for Israel doing anything short of just packing up and leaving the Middle East altogether.
The intellectual cowardice here, is the Elite (media/journalist/public) class not having the balls to tell this to the masses. The media is a mirror for the masses and the masses just want bad things to stop happening NOW. They don't have the intellectual faculties to simulate the potential outcomes of doing so.
They know it, they think about it, just like you and me. The masses don't.
I dont see how potential future terrorist attacks are worse than the carnage we are seeing in Gaza today, unless you value Israeli lives much higher than Palestinians. Which I totally can understand that Israel does, but why is it a given that the US population values the safety of Israelis to that extent where the current situation in Gaza is an acceptable trade-off? We are after all talking about the safety of a nuclear armed country with the near unconditional backing of the worlds most powerful state, against a terrorist group that according to Israelis themselves consists of 40 000 men controlling a piece of land under naval blockade and without an airport.
Palestinians or whatever terrorist group they have in power at any given time, probably isn't going to be an existential threat for Israel in any meaningful sense the medium term for the reasons you said. And I am also not really looking into the moral calculus of any of this either.
Game theory, real politik, just plain old politics, the code, whatever you want to call it: Most entities have an implicit assumption that other entities won't get in their face, and if they do, they will be hit for it. Palestine in whatever shape it exits, continues to get in Israel's face.
And I also don't really feel too bad for entities that hit other entities and then get hit back, even if they get hit back really disproportionately hard. That includes Palestinian civilians.
It's not like the poor people of Gaza are held hostage by Hamas. Well they are practically if things like a good economy and future is of concern, but I don't think Gazans want all that more than they want the destruction of Israel. They want Hamas, they still think Oct 7 was a good idea given Israels retaliation, they spit on dead bodies of abductees. Palestinians are maxed out in their antisemitism. In a sane world they would have been eveporated yesterday. They are practically a death cult that is a ticking timebomb and a stain on the middle east.
Hamas does, yes.
But what you're talking about here is collective punishment, and the duty for an ethnic group to police it's own members or face consequences.
This is along the same lines as 'men need to police other men' and 'men need to teach boys not to rape'. It's along the same line as holding all Christians accountable for the Westboro Baptist Church and the evangelicals who got Roe repealed. It's along the same lines as making all white people pay for reparations or take a back seat in hiring until racial inequities have been repaired. And etc.
Which are not things I'm necessarily against! To me, the main difference between these cases is consequentialist, in that on one hand people are maybe being shamed a little and maybe receiving mild financial penalties, and on the other hand thousands of innocents are being killed.
But, people who argue this type of logic in the case of Palestine and Hamas, should realize how the logic applies to other cases where they might be on the other side of the issue.
Correct. If Germans don't think about the consequences of electing a radical party to control the Reichstag, and the Nazis get control of the country and start annexing and invading the neighbors, the result is that other countries declare war on the entire country of Germany and not just on the individuals controlling policy. This is because the basic assumption of the modern nation-state system is that the nation is the sovereign unit, and has the right, ability, and duty to ensure it is governed in the manner it prefers.
If the Palestinians can't even ensure their representatives to the rest of the world match their preferences, then it's hard to call them a "nation" in any meaningful sense.
Hamas is indeed not recognized as the governing body of a nation.
Not for any logical reason. Gaza, from the mid 2000s to 10/7/23 was a sovereign state that was not occupied by any foreign power. The sole reason for them not being recognized internationally was so NGOs and the like could justify sending them lots of money and aid (which they knew would fund terrorism).
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De facto, it was.
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