domain:npr.org
SSCReader
1hr ago
The fact that the numbers are skewed can't be used to show escalation or deescalation because otherwise the less effective or less technological able will always look like they are de-escalating when they are actually just killing as many as they reasonably can and if their capabilities change, so will the numbers they kill.
If a weaker person punches you as hard as they can and you deck them as hard as you can in return and break their jaw, then you didn't escalate, you just retaliated proportionally. You aren't obligated to only match the level of your response to their weakness. If they shoot you with a .22 and you have a .45 you are not obligated to find a smaller gun to shoot back with. They should have considered that before attacking you. Don't poke the bear is advice for a reason.
Now I still agree Israel is far from blameless here. There is plenty of things they have done which are problematic. And so has Hamas. But just because one is weaker and therefore can't kill as many is not an issue, especially because Israel can argue the only reason Hamas kills fewer is because they heavily blockade them and prevent them getting more missiles etc.
2D3D
1hr ago
I find it baffling that people even here do not ask what the Arabs themselves say they want. Even the laziest retard (me) can join an Arab telegram group and click 'translate' to see what shit they say. The Arabs repeatedly make it clear that they want to sibjugate the jews and america. Its even on the fucking houthi flag (worst flag design ever btw, breaks al rules)! Yet even HERE people seem disinclined to give Palestinians agency for their own actions, treating them as some oppressed animal that had no choice but to rape teenagers and livestream their murders to their adoring fans. Maybe, just MAYBE, the Palestinians who say they want to kill all jews mean it. I mean, what level of fucking crypto fascism is this, declaring it in the open.
2rafa
1hr ago
I think different American groups would still take sides, no differently to how they have over Russia. Israel would not collapse or be immediately destroyed if the US decided to treat it as a neutral third country.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1hr ago
Well, I'm not American, but as a matter of fact Americans are currently made to support Israel in those three ways (same e.g. for Germany, whose citizenship I have), and the argument fielded for it is primarily moral. (I haven't seen convincing materialistic arguments, and that doesn't seem to be a domain a great deal of effort is poured into by anyone.) It's not like I'm not aware of all these factors you mention, but I get the sense that they would not withstand the load that they would have to bear if the moral pillar disappeared (soft power of "the only democracy in the Middle East" is discredited, geopolitical implications are lazily reasoned, millenarianism is no longer as influential as it was during the Bush years and anyhow they'd actually cheer the war if you convinced them Iran/Palestine is Gog and Magog...).
2D3D
1hr ago
At the same time, the one question I've never seen Israel defenders answer in a proper way is; considering that Israel has in fact never claimed that West Bank and Gaza belong to it, who do they belong to? Israel still, in some weird vague way? Then why isn't it claiming them, or offering the inhabitants citizenship? Egypt and Jordan
@Dean did an AAQC that answered this point: Israel actually did not want Gaza or West Bank, but stomped the Egyptians and Jordanians so hard in 67 and 78 that the Egyptians and Jordanians both renounced their claim/administrative right to Palestinian territories while ceding to Israels demands for peace/ceasefire and political recognition. Opponents of Israel state that the 1948 borders mark out Israeli territory, which is true. But 1948 borders also indicate what is Egyptian and Jordanian territory: Gaza and West Bank. Till now the Egyptians and Jordanians refute any claim, administrative or historical or ethnic, to Gaza or the West Bank, and the failure of the PA to govern their territory much less articulate what territory they actually claim is a reflection of Palestinian intransigence as opposed to Israeli oppression.
Corvos
1hr ago
The Catholics on the Supreme Court are sort of a conspiracy as well, right? My understanding was that the Federal Society pushes them as being reliably anti-progressive due to the abortion issue. And some people do Notice.
I believe e.g. Scottish-Americans used to do extraordinarily well
Never knew that. They did disproportionately well in GB for a long time.
The case of Indians is also complicated: for example, until recently England, Scotland and Ireland were all run by Indian heads of state and that seems somewhat dubious as well.
what I am frankly not comfortable with is when that discussion seems to be, in my judgement, motivated by a hatred of Jews as such that appears prior to any evidence, or even prior to any attempt to treat Jews as ordinary people or fellow citizens
Agree completely. What concerns me is when bringing up Jewish representation at all becomes defined as Jew-hatred in and of itself.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1hr ago
It is absolutely ridiculous that a neoghbouring state would be allowed to rain missiles on your civilians without retaliation
Apart from this sentence being almost perfectly constructed to invite the "which of the two do you mean, now?" response - allowed by whom? I don't mean to presume to tell the Israelis what they can and can't do, but the main thing being discussed is whether I (as a non-Israeli) am supposed to send money to help the Israelis, Palestinians, both or neither.
Either way, what would happen if the Palestinians "got good" is a fully unexplored counterfactual. If we assume things are operating on blood feud logic, it wouldn't be surprising that if they actually managed to level the kill count and get their 100ksomething kills of Israelis, the Palestinians would consider the debt settled and be willing to negotiate earnestly. (Of course, 100k dead Israelis would likely make Israel go nuclear, with the US paying and delivering the nukes.)
2rafa
1hr ago
I don’t think Americans are under any moral obligation to ‘support Israel’ (monetarily, militarily, or merely ideologically). It’s not a hugely interesting conflict in that it’s the kind of situation that happens all over the world, all the time. Its unique popularity as a topic of political discussion is entirely for two reasons: the first being the unique success of Jews as intelligent market dominant minorities in Western countries, and the second being the growing centrality of the conflict to global Islamic identity and in particular, in recent decades, to the extensive global propaganda effort the Iranian Shia movement has attached to its support for the Palestinian cause with the global ummah. So you have two billion Muslims, some of whom are involved in fighting their own proxy conflict, against a small but very wealthy, influential and intelligent population who see the conflict as an existential war (something few non-Palestinian Muslims do). This elevates a run of the mill tribal conflict to something of greater interest for many people. Then there are secondary factors which are not mostly responsible for people caring but which add intrigue like nuclear weapons, Christian views on Israel and Jewish eschatology, US-Russia-China great power conflict in the wider region and so on.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1hr ago
"Justice"/moral right is what I mostly see being invoked to convince populations of third-party countries including ones I live and pay taxes in to support Israel, transfering things of value and exposing themselves to risk. This is why I see the need to argue against it. If I am asked to sacrifice for a cause for the sake of justice, I would like to know if the cause is actually just.
sliders1234
1hr ago
Agree. The broad strokes are obvious.
Doing that in practice is hard. Most businesses have some market power and even Americas tech firms have some competition. Excel is actually a great example. Some time around 2010 MSFT stock was trading in the 20’s and conventional wisdom was it’s a value trap and going out of business. Googlesheets were invented and free. Eventually people realized there are a lot of 50+ year old bankers and accountants that would rather write a check to Microsoft every year for $100 than learn a similar but slightly different software. Which is rational by those bankers as writing a Microsoft check for about $2k the rest of the career is a lot cheaper than learning new software (at $200 an hour that’s 10 hrs of work). And since the old people wouldn’t switch all the young people had to be compatible. At one point conventional wisdom was Excel was not a monopoly but I would say today it is a monopoly.
Even a fairly basic cake making business has a little market power. As it’s a pain point to travel an extra 15 minutes to find another baker.
I would say Excel = restricted Baker= not restricted most people would say is fair. But the exact line is far messier.
An interesting current case is the Tapestry/Capri merger. A quick synopsis is Tapestry is buying Capri which is basically a roll-up of mid-tier luxury brands. Handbags and shoes. I think these markets are highly competitive and fairly easy to enter (honestly Temu seems to have a lot of cheaper products that look the same). The Biden administration is suing to block the mergers saying antitrust/monopoly. I think this market is clearly in the baker category.
Disclosure: long and wrong. It’s trading $36. Deal closes at $56. If it breaks your probably talking a puke close to $20 and eventually trading around $25. I think the economics are clearly in favor of it closing. But it’s in a NY Court with a Biden appointed judge which is outside my personal Overton window of knowledge and I deeply distrust blue enclave courts now.
2D3D
1hr ago
Arabs suck at war, news at 11. Israeli defensive tech and policies prevent palestinians from easily driving on a road to run over jews or stab kids or have missiles rain down. It is absolutely ridiculous that a neoghbouring state would be allowed to rain missiles on your civilians without retaliation, much less how they celebrate it. The presumption that the palestinians are acting with restraint is bullshit, their feeble kill rate is a function of their incapability, not lack of desire. If the palestinians want a better kill ratio, get good.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1hr ago
For those people like you (@4bpp) who I assume does not actually want the destruction of Israel, what do you see as a solution?
I honestly think that either of the two no-state solutions might be long-term preferable to the perpetual continuation of what we have now. Most of the Jewish population of Israel would find its bearings in the West very quickly, and I think that a future repeat of Nazi Germany or conditions in other countries around then seems exceedingly unlikely; on the other hand, giving Israel free hand to completely wipe out the Palestinians would be the solution that in German idiom one would call a "horrible end, instead of a horror without end", and certainly would make for an interesting addition to our collective consciousness.
In more realistic and less edgy terms, I think that radically redrawing the borders of Israel and Palestine for a two-state solution that hurts both of them, perhaps surrendering half of Jerusalem and everything to the south of a line linking Gaza to it to a Palestinian state in return for everything north of it, performing full population transfer and deploying international troops enforcing the border (and possibly also a temporary "colonial regime" to "dehamasify" the Palestinian state, run not by the Israelis but by some far-removed and suitably ruthless third party like the Chinese, or even the Saudis), would in fact be achievable and likely solve the problem. The problem of Israel and Gaza as I see it is that Israel can not actually curb its cupidity towards Palestinian lands, Gaza as a state is geographically unviable (unlike the West Bank), and the Palestinians are forced to interact with Israelis for key needs as they do not have a fully independent state or economy, producing resentment-breeding interactions such as Palestinian workers having to undergo daily invasive searches as they leave their open-air prison settlement to work on non-autonomy land and in turn getting to scam and sass the Israelis in their cheap car repair shops. (Both things I've observed when visiting Israel.)
Israelis have made at least some attempts to ease up on the Palestinians and let them try to build a society, and every such easing up has resulted in more suicide bombings or October 7.
The "easing up" looked like thousands of Palestinians being killed in retaliation for a single-digit number of Israelis killed every few years. Going just by raw numbers, in the back-and-forth of action and reaction, it really looks a lot like the Israelis are constantly escalating and the Palestinians are constantly deescalating - there is not a single instance of Palestinians killing Israelis that was not followed by Israelis killing more Palestinians, and no single instance of Israelis killing Palestinians that was not followed by Palestinians killing fewer Israelis. Yet this is somehow being painted into an emotional picture of the Israelis trying to make peace, as the Palestinians escalate and push for war. It is very hard to avoid the temptation to interpret this reframing as stemming from an underlying feeling that in terms of weregeld an Israeli is worth about a thousand Palestinians.
2D3D
1hr ago
Israeli new historians, like all intellectual dissidents, use intellectual solidarity with the far enemy (Arabs in this case) as weapons to attack the proximate enemy (the established intellectual/political order of the current moment). Without mass annihilation of dissident intellectuals like what all communist and most fascist regime's did, these new waves ALWAYS cherry pick their data to support their arguments, because destroying the near enemy matters more. Note that Morris himself has recanted from his earlier 'Arabs have always been peaceful victims of my ancestors violence' following the second intifada: perhaps once the far enemy makes its intentions more clear it becomes unwise to continue advancing their cause.
I find it especially disingenuous to presume innocence in Arab intentions. Jewish cruelty has to transformed out of the fog of war, but Arab genocidal intentions are always downplayed. Azzam Pasha gleefully called for the genocide of Israel at 1948, and intellectuals sympathetic to palestine have to morph this somehow into Azzam being a pro peace champion of Palestinians, ignoring that the Arabs started the war and were busy trying establish success to divide up the spoils.
Israel is certainly no virtuous lamb innocent of sin, but the endless attempts to castigate Israel by ascribing unlimited moral virtue to explicitly genocidal Arabs is loathsome even to casual normies. For members of this board who have a few more brain cells than average (108 iq gang rise up!) the Palestinian cause is the meme of the bike guy tripping himself over.
People who call themselves "punks" enthusiastically sign up to the same stifling speech rules as every HR department in every multinational megacorporation in the western world and excoriate others who deviate.
These punks live in a crab bucket. A person (especially a white person) has little hope of advancement in journalism or academia, where hundreds apply for every job.
Angry about his reduced station at life compared to his grandiose self-perception, the doxxer lashes out at the one group it is still permissible to attack.
For one day at least, the doxxer gets to feel powerful in an otherwise small and wasted life.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1hr ago
It's probably the most beloved or second most beloved kids show today (running with Bluey).
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1hr ago
Well, I do write a hard scifi novel set in the wake of an abortive singularity where people start getting superpowers for Plot Reasons™, so I suppose I've given it some thought. Or at least I had governments and polities would react.
It depends on how dangerous said power is. For someone who is no more threat than a random dude with a knife, you really don't have to bother. When they're the modestly dangerous, thorough surveillance and mandatory psychiatric followup. If they're incredibly powerful, they're usually conscripted into the military. And if they're both powerful and act up, then time for their brain to be put in a jar, or tamper proofed (fail deadly) high explosives embedded in their occipital protuberance.
Anyone who falls in between, they get a full time slap drone assigned to them, a concept happily ripped off from Banks. Something constantly hovering over their shoulder, ready to call for backup it sedatives, neurotoxins, or a bullet fails.
Some powers, such as telepathy or mind control, are severely restricted on pain of death. Non-consensual mind control is a capital crime, at least if you're not on a leash by a state. Technomancers are absolutely not supposed to mess about with AGI, on pain of having their heads exploded.
Of course, some people are simply too powerful to be handled in such a manner, but the governments of the globe devote a great deal of effort in having contingencies for their contingencies, and if you get really out of hand they'll have someone teleport you into the sun, or maybe a black hole. Not that even that can put down the equivalent of Superman.
If you want a more in depth explanation, well, I guess I wrote the book on it? But you can achieve a lot by playing them off each other, and mostly normalizing the strict monitoring and regulation of the lot. Which is how I'd expect it would go down.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Touché!
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
Well, I think it's just a fact to begin with that Jews are very heavily overrepresented in industries like media and finance. There are a number of ways to account for that historically, going back centuries to the only trades Jews were permitted in the Middle Ages, to the effects of Jewish settlement clustered around media centres (most famously New York), or even just the way that, as a culture with strong internal bonds and high in-group trust and a heavy focus on education, Jews were naturally set up to do well in modern society and benefitted from unusually strong patronage networks.
Where I start to get suspicious is where Jews in particular are singled out and other groups, which might be equally disproportionately represented, are not. I suppose an obvious example would be the composition of the US Supreme Court, which has been utterly dominated by Catholics for a while - it's currently six Catholics, two Protestants (one of whom was raised Catholic), and one Jew, and it's not been that long since it was six Catholics and three Jews. How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination? There are some theories I find plausible (in particular I note that Catholicism and Judaism are both religions with a heavy emphasis on law, so it makes sense that their practitioners might more of an affinity for become lawyers; this bodes badly for Protestants on the court in the future, but might imply that Muslims will do well), but what I find more striking is how few people seem to care. It's not as if anti-Catholic conspiracies are foreign to American history; yet there is no discussion of this at all.
Likewise there are other ethnic groups that are noticeably overrepresented in terms of wealth or power in the US. Setting aside the obvious modern ones (Indians are currently the top, I think?), I believe e.g. Scottish-Americans used to do extraordinarily well. Yet there is no particular interest in this today.
I grant, as a starting point, that Jews have done very well in the media in the US and probably in the UK (though I am less familiar with the British context). I think it's probably fair enough to have a frank discussion about that.
But what I am frankly not comfortable with is when that discussion seems to be, in my judgement, motivated by a hatred of Jews as such that appears prior to any evidence, or even prior to any attempt to treat Jews as ordinary people or fellow citizens. I think my starting point for talking about the particular history of the Jews is that no one's coming into the dialogue massively prejudiced. And unfortunately that is not a bar that everyone meets.
jeroboam
1hr ago
I’m not really opposed to colonialism. .... Generally the colonized people (with certain political restrictions) ended up with more freedom.
I agree. Anti-colonialism, as practiced in the real world, is the belief that groups have rights but people do not. That it's better to be a slave under people who look like you, then free under a white person.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2hr ago
I mostly agree with what you said, except your last paragraph seems like a bit of a category error to me. I'm not particularly concerned with which outcome would be more perverse here, but it does concern me that wherever I go, the government and influential parts of local society seem to assert that Israel is in fact in the right and it is our (and by extension my) moral obligation to support them with actions and treasure. It is this chain of reasoning that I want to argue against. Even if I accept the premise that I have a duty to contribute to right moral wrongs everywhere on the planet at all (and I don't!), I am not convinced that helping Israel is directionally correct to right moral wrongs. On top of that, it is not even instrumentally beneficial for me or the countries I live in, as helping Israel makes it a more likely target of spite and retaliation by the supporters of Palestine and produces a steady stream of low-human-capital immigration from the fallout, and, well, has a cost in actions and treasure. On the other hand, if Israel were actually obliterated, its high-human-capital people would probably emigrate into one of the same countries and contribute positively to living conditions here!
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
2hr ago
I believe nations main principal should be vae victus and hate the modern worlds glorification of victims. Child victims should be a stain on the honor of the government who was supposed to be defending them not a way to rally support to their cause. I view Hamas as something like an abusive father. I view Israel the same way on Oct 7th.
NewCharlesInCharge
2hr ago
There was a guy on 90 Day Fiancée who explicitly said to his very religious fiancée that he doesn’t believe in God, but that he does believe in aliens.
Apologies for the Facebook link, couldn’t find it elsewhere: https://facebook.com/90DayFiance/videos/children-to-aliens-90-day-fiance-season-8/414612926588272/
To make my own position clear:
Either you believe in an international rules-based order or you don’t
I don't. I am deeply skeptical of the ICC and equivalent bodies. I think that they are talking shops which restrict national sovereignty in ways that are tendentious and illegitimate.
Issuing arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel would not only be unjustified, it would expose your organization’s hypocrisy and double standards. Your office has not issued arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or any other Iranian official, Syrian President Bashar al Assad or any other Syrian official, or Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh or any other Hamas official. Nor have you issued an arrest warrant for the genocidal General Secretary of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, or any other Chinese official.
Sounds spot on to me.
However, the US currently attempts to portray itself as an impartial keeper of the rules based order, whilst making every attempt to bias the rules in its favour and ignoring any rules it doesn't like, as with the ICC.
I would prefer it if someone like Donald Trump simply said clearly that America's interests come first and if you don't like that you need to be strong enough to stand up for yourself, so that the rest of us can stop slobbering over decades old pieces of paper and get a grip. Alternatively, I would like the US to reign itself in: to be as scrupulous about the sovereignty of other countries as it is about its own.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
2hr ago
I've been reading a lot about this conflict, and the history of Israel and Palestine. I've read books by Israeli historians and by Palestinian historians and by American historians and journalists. I've followed pro-Israeli channels and pro-Palestinian channels. I've also spoken to no small number of Arabs (since I am studying Arabic).
It's messy and complicated all around. What strikes me in every narrative is that most of them tell a more-or-less accurate version of known historical events, but always leaving out a few bits that make their side look less noble and less like the victim. The Israelis talk endlessly about how five Arab nations declared war on them the day after they declared independence, and they offered full citizenship rights to those Palestinians who stayed instead of fleeing (in the expectation that the Jews would soon be exterminated and they could return home). They don't talk about how there were explicit plans to remove even peaceful Palestinians and some of those expulsions were performed under presumed military necessity and with the full foreknowledge that they were uprooting locals from their land. They don't talk about some of the outright terrorist actions of their predecessors, and some of the atrocities that Israelis committed. (It was war, the Israeli army mostly conducted itself in a modern, disciplined fashion, but there were some civilian massacres, and other war crimes. The Israelis will retort that the Arabs did far more and far worse, which is probably true but doesn't make what they did not happen.)
The Palestinians talk endlessly about the Nakba and how 750,000 Palestinians were forced off their land. They don't talk about the fact that yes, many of them did explicitly leave so the Arab armies could exterminate the Jews, and thus they obtained the fate of a people who lost a war they started.
Dig into that event, and then you have to dig deeper - why did the Jews arrive in the first place, who was behind it, did they acquire land legally or did they forcefully occupy it? (They mostly acquired the land legally by purchase, prior to 1948, but Palestinians will then retort, accurately, that the Jews often bought the land from wealthy absentee Turkish (former Ottoman) landlords and then expelled the villagers who'd been living on that land for generations.) Was the Zionist movement an organic Jewish nationalist movement or was it a "Colonialist-Settler project" by Europeans whose motivation was essentially to get Jews out of Europe? (Answer: a little of all this and more.)
"It's complicated." People who want a clear right-and-wrong narrative hate that phrase, but it is. Move forward into all the many failed peace processes; Israelis claim Palestinians have been handed opportunities for peace over and over and rejected them. Palestinians claim all those peace offers were either made in bad faith or were very bad deals for the Palestinians. Who's right? A little of both. Palestinians have turned down deals that would have been objectively far better for them than what they have now, or have ever had. These agreements have also always been, at best, offers of divided rump territories with very little chance to ever develop into real countries. Many Palestinians feel that the offers themselves are fundamentally illegitimate because Palestine was stolen from them and only full restoration can make things right again. Regardless of whether you think this is a morally correct argument, it unfortunately carries the logical conclusion that there is literally no peace agreement they will accept that allows Israel to continue to exist. No matter how convincingly you argue that your people and your ancestors were screwed over and robbed and are entitled to reparations, if it ends with "... and therefore Israel must cease to exist," it's just a non-starter. But Palestinians (and many of their supporters), either out of stubbornness, or a belief that somehow either Hamas and Iran will actually succeed in destroying Israel, or else Israelis will somehow all be persuaded that they must dissolve the nation-state of Israel, persist.
You basically have three options: one state, two state, no state. The latter ("no state") is basically one side exterminates the other. Israelis are being accused of trying to do this now. I don't really think that's true, but certainly some elements of Israeli society and the government would not mind literally wiping out the Palestinians if they thought they could get away with it. Hamas is pretty explicit about wanting to eradicate Israel. Some of their more savvy apologists will say no, they just don't want Israel to exist "in its current form." Usually, if you pin them down, what they propose is something like the "one state" solution, where "From the river to the sea," the entire country becomes a multi-ethnic non-Jewish state with Jews and Arabs having full equal citizenship rights. Essentially, merge Israel and Palestine into one country. In theory, doesn't sound like a terrible idea (as long as you're not a Jew who is invested in a Jewish nation state), but it just sort of assumes that at that point, all the Palestinian Arabs (who outnumber the Jews considerably), who for generations have been openly calling for the literal extermination of all Israelis and claiming that every last Israeli is living on stolen land that must be given back, will say "Okay, we're cool now, you can live here with us. Let's all build a progressive multicultural society together." Let's just say I cannot blame the Israelis for considering that a non-starter.
That leaves the two state solution, which was fraught and unlikely before October 7 and pretty much impossible now, at least for a generation or two. The various schemes to apportion land to a new Palestinian nation have always struggled with Palestine being divided between Gaza and the West Bank - obviously not much of a country if you're divided between two regions with a historically hostile neighbor controlling all the land and travel between them. Also there's the problem of whether the Palestinian nation gets to have its own military, and build whatever they want in the way of weapons. Israelis have pretty good reasons to say hell no to that, at least until maybe we have a generation or two of peace convincing them that any new Palestinian army will not promptly start lobbing rockets and artillery shells at them. So the Palestinians argue (with some justification) that every offer they've been given has been for a fragment of a country that will still for all practical purposes be a protectorate under the military control of Israel, and the Israelis argue (with some justification) that the Palestinians have to prove they aren't going to keep trying to kill Israelis before they can have more.
Bringing us to today. Most people in the West are more sympathetic to the overall perspective of the Israelis, because we can see that yes, historically the Arabs really have been trying to kill them for decades now, and the Israelis have made at least some attempts to ease up on the Palestinians and let them try to build a society, and every such easing up has resulted in more suicide bombings or October 7. Leftists say, well, the Palestinians are an oppressed people, they are entitled to armed resistance. I always try to get them to say the unspoken part, to reveal their power level (just like I do with our friend @SecureSignals): okay, what is the end goal? Tell me what you really, really want to happen if you "win"? Most leftists won't come out and say "I want Israel to be destroyed." Some of them will give some sort of pie-in-the-sky one state answer, like above. But the reality is that the literal destruction of Israel is the only real "win condition" for them.
For those people like you (@4bpp) who I assume does not actually want the destruction of Israel, what do you see as a solution? Besides just "Stop the bombing now," which I can sympathize with, but let's say Israel stops the war in Gaza today and withdraws, and promptly allows unlimited international support in to rebuild. What happens next? What I think happens next is that Hamas grabs as much of that as they can and plans the next October 7, which will happen sooner rather than later. As much as I would like to see Gazan civilians not being bombed (and I do not care if "80% of them support Hamas," which is a frequent justification for why, essentially, we should not feel bad about them being slaughtered), I can understand why Israelis are not willing to accept a stopping point that just returns to the status quo and another October 7.
The more peaceful leftists will then say "They should cease fire now and then negotiate a real peace that gives Palestinians a real state so there is no need for Hamas etc etc etc." Okay, great idea. Everyone's been trying to do that for decades. See above.
So, simply saying "The Palestinians have a clear moral case," even if you're right, does not solve the current problem. Unless you are willing to bite the bullet and say "Yes, actually, I think Israel needs to cease to exist." Followed by either how you think peaceful coexistence between former Israelis and Palestinians will be accomplished, or your plan for forcibly resettling all the Israelis to another continent. Some would at this point show their power level and say "Yeah, actually, just let them slaughter all the Jews, they have it coming." But that would make the Palestinians' clear moral case a little less clear.
benny morris changed his political views and said "transfer/expulsion is good actually", but he is still willing to call it such.
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