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Debkin's avatar

When someone says to me we’ll make more terrorists in Gaza my response is well we have quite a few and about eighty percent support them so I’m not really sure how worse it can get. One clear way to reduce support is to cause the adversary to lose badly. They thrive on victory. The world is intent on not having Hamas and their supporters lose badly. The world likes dead Jews as the book title goes and nothing else explains the profound double standard that elevates this conflict to the worst current event and to hear the deranged tell it a Nazi caliber genocide. Of course you then have efforts to rewrite the word genocide and then of course not that apply that new definition to anyone other than Israel. I would exchange the word hope for annihilationist fantasy. I am sure this state of affairs owes not just to religious conflict and rejectionism but also to unchecked radical indoctrination and exceptional illiberalism. I would argue the Palestinians held better opinions of Israelis before the return of Arafat. I would also argue the west has a huge hand in the current negative state of affairs. I would further state the obvious that illiberal poorer societies on the border of liberal successful societies can be a volatile formula in different ways. And let’s not pretend that it’s only Jews that have had difficulty as a minority in the contemporary Middle East. I also don’t pretend that you can’t radicalize a population because I think Russia will be hated rightly by Ukrainians for generations and it may never be reparable. That’s Russia’s doing. There are instructive lessons there too. From the time of Khrushchev Russia was going through a slow thaw first reckoning with the evils of Stalin to loosening grip on the media and it culminated sadly with yeltsin’s fatal mistake of elevating Putin to save himself. The average person should know of navalny same as they knew of Mandela and navalny made the ultimate sacrifice knowingly. So then you have rigid state control of the media in Russia, imprisonment and murder of journalists, massive propaganda and a generation that is substantially poisoned. You might argue that as with the Palestinians the ingredients were still there you just have to stir it up but America with all its freedoms went through many evolutions and probably our biggest mistake is thinking evolutions of other cultures will look like ours but certainly they can evolve positively. I’m not sure how much lower you could sink as a society than being in thrall to a death cult that sacrifices children and can’t muster outrage over resources being used to build a tunnel system and war machine over infrastructure.

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Tanto Minchiata's avatar

This is the correct argument. It has to be manifestly evident to the Arabs that they have no chance of destroying Israel. If it wasn't for the anti-Semites and the associated imbeciles in the rest of the world egging them on, they likely would have stopped before now. Ultimately fewer people will die and the Arabs will be forced to deal with their own massively dysfunctional, failed societies if the Palestinian issue is put to rest. It's not like there's nowhere for these people to go. The Arabs can be forced to take them in. It's a relatively small population compared to the surrounding countries. Then let the Arabs deal with their own. But they aren't going to get a state and they aren't going to Israel. Appeasing bullies and psychopaths never works. The Arabs begged for this war. They got exactly what they wanted. Israel should be generous and give them more than they asked for, so they never ask again. Hopefully this conflict results in the West stopping its own path toward suicide by Islam. Unbelievable stupidity is not a survival strategy. The Israelis are showing the way. Let them finish the job.

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