Strong points and I'll add that Hamas is a Muslim brotherhood offshoot, which recently Egypt's military overthrew in the past decade after their first "free and fair" elections, since then many members of the Muslim Brotherhood were sentenced to death.

Totally agree on the radicalization comment as well, I recently read an old poll from 2013 which demonstrated this: [Link]

I don’t have a stunning conclusion to offer other than “peace in the Middle East seems like a hard problem.”

But even though that conclusion sounds banal, I do think it’s important. As it happens, Palestinian rights are defined in this discourse in a way that Israelis understand as being incompatible with the fundamental existence of their country. That makes the problem much thornier than if it were just a dispute about the exact borders of a Palestinian state. In the west, we frequently see a politics of pure position-taking around this.
You can become a good progressive ally by espousing certain slogans at the cost of alienating yourself from mainstream Jewish institutions or vice-versa. But none of that amounts to a practical strategy for resolving anything. All kinds of countries all over the world mount fierce resistance to the idea of dramatically revising their immigration policies to permit much larger uncontrolled inflows, over and above the specific historical factors at play. Of course if Israelis had totally different opinions from the opinions they actually hold, this might be a relatively easy problem to fix. And by the same token, if the nature of the Palestinian Cause were defined differently, then the problem of improving Palestinians’ lives and welfare would likely also be much easier to solve. Given the actual configuration of views, though, it’s a very challenging situation. And if you don’t acknowledge how hard the underlying problem is, you’re likely to end up underrating the behavior of various third parties — when in fact it really just is a hard issue.

I'll repeat what I said in a previous post from yesterday:

The recent attack by Hamas has shocked the current conflict out of the now default war of choice framework and made it clearly a war of necessity. I expect Israel to do whatever it takes to at the very least either dismantle Hamas or establish a buffer zone between itself and the people of Gaza. If it does not, the problem will fester, and the Israelis will find themselves in the exact same position a few years down the line. It would be nice to believe that the Palestinian conflict could be solved by the stronger side being more accommodating towards its enemy. But there is little in the history of warfare, and certainly nothing in the doctrine of Hamas, to suggest this is a viable path forward. The choice faced by Israel is a tragic one, no matter how much in denial those currently calling for restraint are about this fact.

Apologies for snark in previous posts towards one of the users, but when something has been debunked for 36 hours now, it is a little maddening.

You have better arguments to run than that. 471 dead and counting. Do you think every government on the planet would be commenting if it was only a fire cracker in a car park.

He probably got them from a seance with Yasser Arafat.

Edited by georgenorman (19 Oct 2023 4.02pm)

How’s the pie

I really hate the fact that we have to ally ourselves with these ruthless b******s, but the other 'team' would kill us all if they could.

Killing children? It's monstrous.