TotallynotJessica , 10 months ago

You seem to assume that there are two possible positions: Hamas must be supported in what they do to Israelis, or the Israeli government must be supported in what they do to Palestinians. This dichotomy is bullshit. The Israeli government can theoretically be changed through democracy to put people that want to coexist with Palestinians in power. Palestine could theoretically have an anti-Hamas organization come to power who work towards coexistence.

However, the campaign of terror that Israel has waged against Palestinians for decades makes it hard for them to want coexistence. Conversely, the threat of Hamas feeds Islamophobic sentiment in Israel, allowing wannabe fascists like Bibi to gain power.

Bibi actually fucked up by not preparing for the attack and not seeing it coming in the first place. Israelis are pissed and it’s predicted that Netanyahu will lose power when things quiet down. Unfortunately, this gives the current government the perverse incentive to continually escalate the war for as long as possible while showing strength against Hamas in the hopes that right wing Israelis forgive them for their incompetence.

To change Israelis leadership, foreigners who want peace should encourage Israel to deescalate the war, and one way to do that might be to prevent both sides from getting the weapons needed to prolong the war. We should sanction Hamas and help Israel stop weapons flow into Gaza, but we should also not give Israel any weapons that fuel their attacks with high collateral damage. No artillery, try to end the blockade of essential resources by helping to police imports, and other techniques to keep Israel from widening the war. Tell them that they will not receive support if they encourage clashes with foreign adversaries. Tell them to only defend settlements in the West Bank and not carry out preemptive attacks.

I doubt Biden will do enough to deescalate, but there is a possibility that he will try to avoid a broader war. The US congress will totally give terrible weapons to Israel with bipartisan support, only helping Netanyahu stay in power.

What’s unforgivable about the response from the West is that many, like you, conflate the desire for peace with support for Hamas. It doesn’t matter if you say Hamas are fascists that must be destroyed, you have to believe that killing Palestinians is the only solution. The only way for the IDF’s strategy to destroy Hamas to work, is if they kill all Palestinians in the West Bank. They could kill 10k, 100k, 1 million, or even 2 million Gazans, but the remaining Palestinians will be no less radicalized. Hell, they’ll probably be even more radicalized than before.

The only way to kill Hamas without genocide is to give Gazans a serious way to improve their conditions. Israel should give billions to the most benevolent Palestinian organizations to invest in the country. They could give Palestinians voting rights and equal access to social services, effectively turning what is currently Isreal into a secular, federal state. The only other way that Israelis could get rid of Hamas is to turn Palestine into a maximally authoritarian police state, and in addition to being very expensive, they’ll probably have settlers push Palestinians out over time, resulting in a slower genocide.

The actual dichotomy isn’t Netanyahu or Hamas, it’s financially cheap genocide, or expensive peace, with slow and expensive genocide existing in between. Not all problems are best solved through violence.