Unfortunately I don’t think he is capable of what you are asking him to do. Remember that the majority of the Israeli population think Israel hasnt gone far enough in Gaza. Yes that’s after starvation and murdering over 30k women and children. On top of that most Israelis see no problem with the Nakba which is the origin of the problem as it displaced the majority of Palestinians turning them into scattered refugees who were robbed of their land and property.
Such mindsets would never allow for achieving peace with neighbors through any strategy that isn’t built around dominance through violence.
"... the Nakba which is the origin of the problem as it displaced the majority of Palestinians turning them into scattered refugees who were robbed of their land and property."
The origin of "the problem" is 1920/1924 when 1200 years of Islamic rule ended in that area, and non-muslims no longer lived under apartheid. With the old oppressive laws rescinded, and no able to enforce peace, a violent mess ensued, with both sides killing each other and the British, until some of the land was divided by the UN in 1947 into two nations, one Jewish and one Arab. Israel took that opportunity to declare their independence.
It was only then that the entire Arab world waged war on on Israel, and the result of that war was the "Nabka", or in other words, the Arabs who declared the war lost.
Keep in mind that far more Jews were "displaced" from the surrounding countries, and were robbed of their land and property.
It is the mindset, created through 1200 years of history, that non-muslims are lesser people and do not deserve self-determination that does not allow peace in that area.
>The origin of "the problem" is 1920/1924 when 1200 years of Islamic rule ended in that area, and non-muslims no longer lived under apartheid
The missing piece here is that happened because of the European support and implementation of Jewish settlement.
The zionists had actually initially considered Argentina, which had constitutional provisions that would have lended well to establishing a Jewish community there, peacefully. Instead they chose the more violent approach in the middle east.
If the Arabs had pushed back harder initially, the Zionists would have quickly just went to their alternative. This accident of history ended up being the difference between the ongoing bloodfued we see now and the much happier alternative.
I provided three facts and an opinion that 1200 years of rule created a mindset that would not allow for the independence of those considered "inferior". You also realize that this 1200 year rule was based on violent conquest, slavery, ethnic cleaning, genocide, and apartheid.
Your response is all conjecture and assumptions. There is no reason that there could not have been peace with two states in 1947.
Other homelands, such as as Argentina and Uganda, were considered backups, not as primaries, in case things did not go well and Jews needed a safe haven. This is because living in the mideast under Muslim rule for Jews is not safe. It has not been safe for 1200 years.
And I agree, if the Arabs won, there would not be bloodshed in the mideast because there would be no Jews left, so I will give you that. I would not call it "happier".
Tell me, if the United States falls apart (not so unlikely), and numerous states formed, would you think it is a good idea for the Native Americans to leave for another part of the world because a bunch of racists here in the US could not accept them having a state of their own and would declare war on them ?
Of course not, Native Americans were here long before Europeans came and brutally ruled over them.
The Jews were in the middle east before Islam came into being, and were brutally oppressed by those that follow Islam for 1200 years.
Stop trying to revise history. The Jews in Palestine were living happily alongside the Muslims. Problems didn’t start until the European Jews arrived to implement Zionism.
The end of Ottoman Empire was decades before Zionist terrorists founded Israel (Lehi, Irgun, Haganah). These are facts.
Israel was founded on theft and by ethnically cleansing Palestine of its indigenous people through non-stop atrocities and terrorism. Literally most of Israel’s first prime-minister were terrorists. Even Jews like Einstein recognized this at the time and refused to be associated with the Zionist project.
Just admit it and then it becomes possible to find a solution that doesn’t require murdering tens of thousands of Palestinian children to ethnically cleanse Palestinians that won’t give up their right to return.
> Just admit it and then it becomes possible to find a solution that doesn’t require murdering tens of thousands of Palestinian children to ethnically cleanse Palestinians that won’t give up their right to return.
Out of curiosity, what would that be? From what I've seen, you'd either have to build a wall/externally enforced border, hoping they get over it after forced peace for X years, or force migrate one of them.
I met an old Palestinian man who still works manual, hard labor. Both his sisters were killed by Israeli Air Force bombing. His family was displaced from Haifa during the nakba. Most his elder brothers were kicked out of Palestine decades ago due to their resistance. Do you know what he spent most of his time in discussion complaining about? How his best friend hurt him years ago and caused him lots of frustrating harm. His best friend was an Israeli. They worked together for many years. He is fully fluent in Hebrew. He had so much to say about his old friend that I think what he hated the most was losing his friend.
People move on if you let them.
Stop killing Palestinians. Stop the settler terrorism. Share Jerusalem and stop antagonizing its people. Admit that your Likud party are a bunch of Fascist, genocidal, maniacs and prosecute them. Give Palestinians the right to return.
Let some time pass and many Palestinians will befriend Israelis and vice versa. And when a Palestinian militant group tries to resist with violence again don’t start murdering civilians. Just treat with them. With time the Palestinians will demand that the violent resistance stops. People just want to live.
As you allude to in your story, Palestinians being friends with Israelis was the norm thirty years ago - there was less separation and Israelis and Palestinians more freely interacted.
But you seem to blame Israel for the situation no longer being this way. You say:
> People move on if you let them
So why is the situation worse now than it was before?
The reason, from an Israeli perspective, is that Israel started a peace process with the Palestinians in which it tried to arrive at a reasonable solution, but the Palestinians eventually refused every offer, including very generous offers, and walked away. Not only that, they launched the second intifada, the deadliest wave of terror attacks on Israel.
Israel tried a different way with Gaza - we can't reach a deal, so fine - we'll just leave Gaza completely. It uprooted all Jewish citizens of Gaza, dismantled all settlements, and left. Gaza then proceeded to elect Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, and started almost immediately shooting rockets at Israel.
So as an Israeli liberal - I absolutely prefer peace and want to get to a peaceful resolution with the Palestinians. But it's honestly unclear to me that we have any partner on the Palestinian side that is willing to live side-by-side with Israel.
>And when a Palestinian militant group tries to resist with violence again don’t start murdering civilians. Just treat with them.
You know that this is precisely what Israel did with Hamas - just dealt with them with them. This is what many people are now criticizing Israel for.
The Jews were living "happily" alongside the Muslims in the same way Native Americans have been living "happily" alongside the Europeans for the past 150 years. What choice do they have ?
Fact: non-muslims lived as Dhimmi, meaning they paid a special tax to keep their "protected" status, which meant they would not be killed or enslaved. They could not bear witness against a Muslim, they could not carry a weapon, they could not use the same type of transport (horse vs donkey),could not build or live in housing that was taller or grander than a Muslim, had to wear clothing to distinguish them from a Muslim, etc.
Calling this "happy" is no better than the southern racists who want to go back to a time when everyone was "happier".
fact: The end of the Ottoman Empire did end decades before Israel was founded. It ended in 1920 when they lost the war with the west and were broken up. In 1924, the caliphate was ended. The violence started in 1920 as there was no one able to enforce the "peace" Jews killed Arabs. Arabs killed Jews. Jews and Arabs killed the British.
fact: It was the two Islamic empires that were founded on theft, war, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid. The last genocide of the Ottoman Empire was during WW1 when they killed 1.5M Christians simply because they were afraid of them joining the west. Maybe because they knew that those Christians were not "happy" ?
fact: Israel was founded in 1948, and it was because of this the Arab world waged war. The Arab world lost the war, and it was the result of this losing the war they themselves started that populations shifted. More Jews than Arabs lost their lands and possessions.
fact: for the first 20 years if Israel's existence, the lands designated for the Palestinian nation were ruled by Egypt and Jordan. Israel spent this time building a nation. What did the Palestinians do ?
fact: The Palestinians and their descendants (now total 2M) who chose to stay in 1948 and live in peace now live under equal laws and have 10 times the prosperity of those living in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon. So, it is quite possible for Palestinians and Jews to live in peace.
Fact: millions of Palestinians displaced by the haganah, Irgun, and the lehi terrorists now live in refugee camps while the Israelis live on their lands and in their houses.
Everything else you wrote is just a bunch of propaganda to distract from the central issue. If you have a problem with the Turks take it up with them. The Palestinians however have a problem with you because you came from Europe and stole their land and killed their people. Address that and don’t ramble about what some non-Palestinians did hundreds of years ago.
I don't agree with your characterization of what happened (you keep saying "stole the land" but that's just not true).
But even if I did - why is this the root problem here, and yet not a problem for the millions of other people displaced in the world around the same time, and since then? There have been tens of millions of refugees around the world since 1948, they've all resettled elsewhere and stopped being refugees, not kept the idea of endless resistance until they reclaim their land, despite there being no way to achieve this without causing just as big a humanitarian disaster now, if not bigger.
You're right that if you consider the central issue to be the existence of Israel, everything else is "propaganda". But in no other case is it considered legitimate to wage endless war built on the idea of completely destroying a country that is recognized by almost every other country in the world.
So a more correct thing to say is that the central issue is that the Palestinians have never agreed to any form of living side-by-side with Israel, despite having several opportunities to do so, and have demands that are quite simply illegitimate.
My take on this is that unlike other "refugees", Muslims were in power for 1200 years, and when that was taken away in 1920, they simply could not come to terms that they were now peer level with non-muslims.
50 generations of political, legal, social, and economic supremacy does not go away quickly, and it has only been about 100 years. Imagine if the US as a nation was forcibly disbanded overnight, and the various ethnic groups (Europeans, Mexicans, blacks, native Americans) were all given an area of land to call their own. It does not take much to imagine the wars that would ensue, and the ethnic and racist hatred they would be based on.
It has been 160 years since just part of the US (southern slavery) was ended, and no lands were divided up into nations, and yet, even today, there are still white people who cannot accept that blacks are peers and have equal rights, have been violently opposed to their equality, and would look forward to going to war to address this "crime against nature".
I think it is too optimistic to expect that ethnic hostility would end after only 100 years after 1200 of oppression.
There is hope - 2M Arabs live peacefully in Israel, are treated equally legally, and mostly equally on a practical basis. And they live safe and productive lives. It is the Arabs that did not stay in Israel, those that either left or stayed in what was supposed to be their nation state (Gaza/West Bank) and have been under the indoctrination, for decades, of those who want to bring back the Caliphate that are the problem. They should be wearing green MIGA hats - Make Islam Great Again
And this is what I find so ironic -those in America that would be gleeful if the Native Americans were to somehow get part of their land back and create a sovereign state, even through violence, are the same people that are appalled that Jews have done exactly that for themselves in Israel.
The Zionist terrorist groups went around murdering villagers and after villagers fled Zionists took their land.
You strike me as a person who repeats the “a land without a people for a people without a land” lies. You just leave out why you didn’t find people in one of the oldest continually inhabited land on earth: you displaced them.
No, I don't say stupid things like that, and probably very few people ever said it (well, except critics of Israel claiming that Zionists said that).
So to be clear, by "stole the land" you're only referring to the Nakba that happened because of the war? Those are the only cases of what you're talking about that I'm aware of (until 1948, I'm not talking about the despicable acts currently happening in the WB).
You seem to have a mindset that prevents you from perceiving reality.
Israel is a country where all of its people live peacefully with each other according to the same rules, including the 20% of its population is Arab. The problem Israel has is not between its citizens, which is the most diverse group of people in the entire middle east. Arabs and Jews can live peacefully together, they currently do so in Israel, and while Jews are the majority, they do not rule the Arab minority with violence or terrorism or by imposing on them a different set of rules or laws.
The Arabs in Gaza, which is not Israel, on the other hand, live in abysmal conditions, one that I would not wish upon anyone. Unfortunately, they have been indoctrinated from birth to hate Jews by their leaders, and leaders of other countries. They hate Jews more than they love themselves. They have clearly stated on many occasions that their intention is to destroy Israel and kill its Jews. For half of the past 80 years, Arabs in Gaza have had their freedom - from 1947 to 1967 and from 2005 to 2025. Both times they chose to use that time not to better themselves, but to arm themselves to fight Israel.
This is not about being Jewish or Arab, it is about the sane and the insane.
I would greatly appreciate if you didn't just assume things about me with absolutely no reason for it.
Or do you also want people to assume everything about your views based on the average views of people in your country?
> Such mindsets would never allow for achieving peace with neighbors through any strategy that isn’t built around dominance through violence.
Just for the record, Israel has managed to achieve peace with many of its historic enemies like Jordan and Egypt, and more recently the UAE and is (was) on the way to achieving relations with Saudi Arabia. The peace in Egypt included giving back land that is 4x the size of all of Israel.
Israel has not achieved peaceful with its neighbors. Israel has achieved peace with the dictatorship governments that rule over their neighbors.
The people of Jordan and Egypt resent the Israelis because of what the Israelis do to the Palestinians on a daily basis. You know settle their lands, destroy their houses, uproot their trees, murder their children, starve their civilians, etc etc.
So there is literally nothing you can credit Israel for? It hasn't even achieved peace in your eyes - despite signing at-the-time historic peace agreements that ended decades-long wars with its neighbors - because that's just with "the government" and not with the people. As if this is a standard applied to any other situation anywhere else in the world.
If Israel ever signs a peace deal with Palestinians, but the Palestinian populace still hates Israel, that would also not count as peace? What would count as peace besides Israel not existing?
I think at this point we have reached Israel needs to stand down and take a long view of things.
Is this working? Israel stole the land. Israel got away with the murder of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Israel has the upper hand but its policy of violent repression and aggressive expansion has created for itself millions of enemies. Will this stand the test of time? Logic says no. So abandon this course while you still have time.
> I think at this point we have reached Israel needs to stand down and take a long view of things.
If you're referring to the war in Gaza, I completely agree. I think the goals of the war are legitimate and correct, but the way the war is being conducted is morally wrong, and we've long since passed the point where the length of the war makes sense. (Like many Israelis, I suspect the war is at least partially continuing because that benefits Netanyahu personally, even as it hurts Israel.)
Killing them all off would achieve peace, though, since their other neighbors (or at least the ones that could prolong a violent war) seem to have no problem with it. It might be the most peaceful solution, though by no means am I implying I agree with it.
I don't wish to kill off anyone, because I think individual rights trump peace.
Based on the population over/under killing off all of Gaza seems to be the most peaceful solution. Israel would work but it has a bigger population, and only one side or the other would have to be eliminated to achieve gaza-israel peace in that conflict.
Of course we don't have any real say in the matter. They're being starved to death as we speak, and once they all perish I don't think they'll be able to defend themselves or engage in hostilities.
JFC this is a really intensely bad line of thinking. This is literally the kind of zero-sum win or lose kill or be killed thinking that lead to the holocaust. There are so so so many other possible way to achieve peace that don’t involve the death of millions.
You very well might have applied this same logic to ireland during the troubles, and advocated for the extermination of all irish-Catholics or all irish-Protestants. Yet we have had 2-3 decades of peace now, and a resuming of violence seems unlikely.
It seems stuck and peace impossible because that serves to reinforce the goals of those with power in this situation. There are solutions, they just involve a small minority with a disproportionate amount of influence (e.g. US oil companies, ideological christian imperialists, zionist absolutists) not getting their way.
If the Arabs had just wiped out the settlers establishing Der Judenstaat near the turn of the 20th century, I have a real hard time coming to a calculus where it wouldn't have been more peaceful death tally than where we are at now.
Ethnic/religious persecution amongst other ethnic/religious groups being the origin of Jewish strife is literally the ideology written by Herzl in the groundwork that argued for Israel, noting incompatibility with living amongst other ethnic groups in Europe, and I would note somewhat accurately considering the Nazis (and others) indeed went on an ethnically aligned campaign to kill them all off.
Unwittingly, you are arguing the foundation of Israel is Nazi ideology.
Not true. Please don't tell falsehoods in HN. The US, EU, UK, and individual countries have all determined no genocide. Moreover, civilian deaths stop in Gaza the moment Hamas surrenders and returns the remaining hostages.
Remember, the tech revolution started in the US so have some respect for my country's opinion on the issue. Israel is a large supplier of tech including computer chip design.
The unfortunate truth is that the Palestinians in a fair election elected Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy Israel.
“Specifically, Israel has committed three acts of genocide with the requisite intent: causing seriously serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group,”
That the political allies of israel defend it by denying an ongoing genocide is hardly evidence it’s not happening.
> Moreover, civilian deaths stop in Gaza the moment Hamas surrenders and returns the remaining hostages.
Israel turned down a deal back in january 2024 that would have released all the hostages.
If hostage taking is wrong - Israel held thousands of palestinians without charges prior to oct 7th.
If hostages are the reason for the war, why has israeli bombing killed so many of the hostages?
> The unfortunate truth is that the Palestinians in a fair election elected Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy Israel.
That, and oct 7th, are all events that happened long after the ethnic cleansing of palestine started. The policy of “Trimming the weeds” lead to an intensification of anti-israeli sentiment in gaza.
But the election of which you speak was in 2006 - and hamas was elected. It’s been 19 years since an election in gaza. So anyone under 37 killed since oct 7th could not have voted for hamas. That’s most of them btw.
Also, you do see that the tread you’re responding to is someone explicitly saying the only path to peace is complete genocide of either gazans or israelis? Pick your friends better maybe?
You’ve created a false choice between endless war and peace thru genocide. Both have been enacted by israel. Pre-oct-7th “trimming the weeds” israel, and the post-oct-7th ethnic cleansing of gaza. The problem isn’t which option you chose - the problem is the framework of the choice is based on a lie and leads to evil actions either choice.
>Based on the population over/under killing off all of Gaza seems to be the most peaceful solution.
That's some of the most degenerate, nihilistic, disgusting, inhumane rhetoric I've ever seen. Ethnic cleansing and genocide is "the most peaceful solution"? What the fuck?
>once they all perish I don't think they'll be able to defend themselves or engage in hostilities.
No shit they won't be able to engage or defend themselves - they'll be dead long before that.
I’ve only seen these kinds of mental gymnastics from Zionists who are forced into this non-coherent blabber to distract from their inhumanity. You must destroy peace for nearly a century to have peace? But then we haven’t had peace for a hundred years genius.
Keep pretending like your murder of children is the way towards peace. The rest of the world will just look at it with disgust.
I know that’s true in theory. But in reality this has become the mainstream interpretation to the point where we see the same take from Israeli government ministers. It’s certainly become mainstream in Israeli right-wing circles and the right-wing has ruled Israel for ever basically.
Such mindsets would never allow for achieving peace with neighbors through any strategy that isn’t built around dominance through violence.