I’m having trouble distilling the essence of your message in a way that leaves us with any common moral ground.
Would you agree that “an eye for an eye” type justice is undesirable? Because it seems like you are advocating for genocide as a response to the oct attack, going well beyond “eye for an eye”!
Boiling it down to a catch phrase does it no justice. The war is being fought in a urban area, with an armed forced who refuses ceasefire and has repeatedly said it wont rest until all isrealis are dead. Again, my comment is, if you want them to stop fighting, what would you have them do next? Im not being rhetorical.
How does this country claim to be any better than Hamas butchers, when they can't conduct a war where their bullets and bombs hit defenseless children? They've been saying "oops, that was a mistake" so many times that it's obvious their operating procedure is "drop the bomb here and we don't care about civilian deaths".
Or they use the excuse that terrorists are hiding under hospitals and schools, so dropping bombs on these things are perfectly acceptable. In my book that's morally indefensible and makes them not very different to Hamas butchers.
Or if you can accept that, maybe crashing planes into the WTC towers is acceptable too (and what about a military target like the Pentagon)...
You would say the same about any group that did the same things to you as the Israeli have done to Palestinians. Answer this: will these actions by Israel decrease or increase the number of people who think that way? Even if they kill all the Palestinians and get rid of the threat in Gaza, they'll just create more, deeper and stronger hate against themselves in the region and the world. If at any point in time they lose the support of the most powerful country on earth, they'll be in huge danger and they can only blame themselves for creating that danger.
What? Outside of like maybe WW2 Germany, no serious country does official press run where they say "The only good x is a dead x". Especially so about private citizens of the enemy country. It constantly feels like Palestine is never held responsible for their actions because theyre getting pummeled so badly on the field.
Defeating your enemy before they can launch another deadly attack is a lot different than genocide or ethnic cleansing. Jesus was talking about personal relationships in that saying, he wasn't running a government or military. Presumably he had a different view on what should happen to the Roman occupiers when the Kingdom of God came, as can be seen in other parts of the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
The problem is Israel treated the entire Gaza population as indiscriminately sheltering Hamas, partly because Netanyahu retains power by keeping conflicts going, and party because the right-wing Jewish extremists want to claim all the land.
What moral people want is to give Israel the same leeway the allies had in WW2. Nothing more, nothing less.
The expectation back then was you should kill Nazis and Japanese until they surrender without any conditions. Hamas always puts conditions on releasing hostages.
I agree. That doesn't make the bombing of Tokyo and Dresden moral acts. War is atrocious by definition.
What is different this time is that most of the west has forgotten what it actually means to be at war and they pontificate from their armchair.
Combine that with the fact that it is generally easier to have empathy for the side that you perceive to be the victim or on the side of justice, and most people truly cannot comprehend how so many Israelis would support their right wing war policies.
I don't think one has to justify the killing of innocent civilians in order to at least try to put themselves in the shoes of people who have been born in Israel and have lived their lives punctuated by the fear of their family or friend being blown up in a bus bombing.
Most people in the west will just not entertain the thought exercise. They'll just dismiss it as "well they invaded Palestine and stole their land", as if this is a justification for suicide bomb attacks or raining rockets over Israeli cities.
I think our collective inability to accept the situation on the ground and push for a compromise is fueling the violence.
Hamas has a strategy where they can leverage their population acceptance of martyrdom in order to gain more and more victim points in their master PR strategy.
Israel feels more and more isolated internationally and they react by giving everybody a big F U and doubling down on their own extremism.
I often hear "Jews should just go back to Europe" as if that is an actual solution.
I believe that if this was any other conflict that didn't involve Jews (e.g. Turks and Kurds) most people would be cheering for peace or they'd be indifferent.
But this conflict has the right mix of inflaming ingredients. There is white colonial guilt and guilt of racism, there is the association of Jews with global capitalism, and associating Jews as "being white".
To be clear, my take is not that since there are other wars like in Sudan, Israel can do whatever they want. All wars should end and every day they continue is a tragedy.
My point is that if one wants to help bring this conflict to an end, one should not put Israel in an impossible position and demand that they simply cease to exist because they "are not native to the land" or similar arguments that people make nowadays.
It's much more effective to pressure Israel to avoid war atrocities if one understands their point of view, their condition and what it means to be under existential threat.
In order to do that you don't have to deny the same to Palestinians.
For some reason most people seem to only reason by taking one side
Would you agree that “an eye for an eye” type justice is undesirable? Because it seems like you are advocating for genocide as a response to the oct attack, going well beyond “eye for an eye”!