Part II:

> We've presented solutions: a one-state solution with complete emancipation for the Palestinian population.

That is the one thing no one wants and is literally the worst idea ever!

Israel has a large Muslim population, but it's a secular state with an ethnically Jewish majority. It is not a colonialist state since it was formed by migration and war, not by a colonial empire.

Lebanon OTOH was formed by the colonial empires as a "fantasy land" based on their lack of understanding in the region. The result was decades of civil war and a failed state due to the diversity of the populace. Syria was another colonial state that slid into a similar situation more recently. Without the Assad family killing all opponents Syria is a damn mess.

A single state is a ridiculous colonial level thinking. We differ too much on a cultural level.

> The problem is the Jewish demographic refuses to accept this, because population trends will soon lead to Jews becoming a minority, which the Jewish population, traumatized by a history of persecution, refuses to accept.

Palestinians don't want it either. You're wrong about the population trends as the fastest growing population in Israel is Hasidic Jews.

> Plan B would be to lift the Gaza Blockade and allow foreign investment to build up Gaza's transport links and offshore natural gas resources

The "give them money for peace" is the exact strategy we tried for the past few decades. Literally gave them suitcases of cash. Hamas leadership hold billions which they steal from their own people, living it up in Qatar.

Before Oct 7th I was working with guys from Gaza. Lots of tech companies in Israel (including Nvidia) were working with people from there. There are great people there. But as long as Hamas exists this sort of strategy just won't work. They will pretend to be onboard and will use that to arm up.

You can't remove a blockade of someone who actively says they want to kill you.

> Combine this with expanded UN peacekeeping patrols (maybe some sort of joint patrols, with one European Christian and one Pakistani/Indonesia/etc. Muslim) to try to keep violence to a minimum until both sides get past their collective traumas.

You mean the UN troops that stood in Lebanon for a year while Hezbolla fired rockets into Israel constantly?

You mean the UN troops who had Hezbolla tunnels dug under their bases and firing posts right in-front of their bases?

Or do you mean the UN troops who held Hamas weapon caches in their offices. Who taught schoolchildren that committing suicide bombings against Israelis will send them to heaven?

Those UN troops?

Sure. The UN is a great body for most countries on earth. Except Israel. The UN came up with more anti-Israel resolutions than all other countries combined. That includes Russia, Saudis, Sudan, NK etc. Israel is apparently worse than all of them. So no, we won't get a fair deal from the UN.

> You removed your ground troops, but you destroyed the Gaza airport before you left (why?), destroyed the foundations of the Gaza seaport as well (why?),

Imagine October 7th with proper weapons and tanks. That's why. Israel left unilaterally due to US pressure. There was no peace deal. The fact is that had Israel not done these things everything would have been so much worse.

> The population has no transportation links to establish meaningful trade relationships and economic prosperity.

That is not true. In the past you could get whatever you wanted in Gaza it just had to go through Israel for security reasons. They still made rockets out of construction pipes.

The problem is that you're confusing two things, the normal people in Gaza who just want to live... For them economic prosperity is great. And the psychos from Hamas who won't be swayed by anything.

You think that people get radicalized by harsh times, that's true. But no amount of economic prosperity will sway Hamas. That is a deep misunderstanding of who they are and their mindset. Bin Laden had all the money in the world and chose to do the terrible things he did. That is not an isolated case. Sinwar was in Israeli prison for murdering other Palestinians (had a guy bury his brother alive with a spoon), he had cancer and Israel cured him then released him.

Still he led the October 7th attacks as he saw that as a weakness. These guys are not "normal". They are a fanatic death cult. The problem is that the people hurt the most by them are the Palestinian people. The only hope the Palestinian people have is if Hamas is destroyed as completely and thoroughly as possible.

> The young men who make up the backbone of Hamas foot soldiers circa 2023 were probably all the children you traumatized in ~2006. That's how you got here.

100% and we're making more of them right now arguably.

You incorrectly assume though that if we stop that will reverse the situation. It will not. It will just happen again and will be FAR worse. The only way out of this is through to the other side. Notice that I'm not in favor of that anymore, I've already resigned myself to the fact that Hamas won't be defeated in this round and that we will probably have a followup clash with Hamas. But next time it will be far more deadly.

> I work with Marines who have fought house-to-house in Iraq and Afghanistan and they are more well-adjusted and humane that what I hear from the average Israeli internet commenter, even on a fairly "enlightened" site such as HN (this place isn't a dumpster fire like Reddit or 4Chan).

Separate Internet comments from the general populace and the soldiers in the field. But I also don't think it's fair to compare our situation to US soldiers.

It's a small country. To put it in perspective the scale of death on Oct 7th is comparable to a 9/11 that killed more than 40k people. We all know someone who died on Oct 7th. Everyone. We all know someone hurt by terrorism. Everyone. It's very personal when you keep running with your kids to shelters and when their earliest memories are of missiles flying overhead.

We all served in the army. Whenever a soldier dies it's the death of a child or a friend. My kids are too young for Army conscription but it's the thing that keeps me up at night more than anything. I don't want them to be a part of an endless war, if there's a risk to soldiers we get the fire first ask later mentality.

Israelis see this as "we tried to do the right thing". We tried to give them a country, we tried peace and signed peace accords with multiple countries (we gave back territory 3x the size of Israel for peace).

But then we get hate online and we take it very personally. Especially when Jews parrot Hamas narrative. That hurts and pushes a lot of Israelis further to the right.

We're also still under deep national trauma that we can't heal. 52 Israelis are still held in Gaza and we feel the absence of every hostage deeply. My spouse would sit with the families of hostages every week until she just broke down mentally. There's a Hebrew saying: Don't judge a man in sorrow.

Our entire nation is in trauma and isn't acting rationally. When you had a similar national trauma you demolished two middle eastern countries and contributed to the current situation.

I split my reply to two parts since it's too long.

> Twenty years of military service, and I've worked with Fallujah veterans. Even we in the notoriously heavy-handed Marine Corps somehow manage to not annihilate as many families as the IDF does in Gaza. Don't think we have a systemic history of using human shields either: https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-arm...

That's interesting. It's also missing a few very important details.

Israel was never this violent prior to Oct 7th. Things escalated and Israel wasn't the one who started the escalation.

Unlike America who can just break the middle east and leave, Israel has to stay. Your guys destroyed Afghanistan and then blamed the Afghani people for "not fighting for themselves". Israel tried to fight this gently and morally, and a lot of Israelis see that as a failure.

The main problem here is that there's widespread Muslim delusion surrounding Israel. In early 2024 a missile hit my home (not much happened thanks to Iron Dome) I posted a photo on LinkedIn and got confronted by a Moroccan living in Europe. We had a lively albeit heated discussion similar to the one I'm having with you.

He was sure that all Israelis will "run back to Europe" and kind of fumbled when he found out my ancestry is Moroccan too (he was pretty sure they were great to Jews, which admittedly they weren't that bad). But he was adamant that within 5 years Israel will be gone. Cease to exist. I asked him if it's legitimate to wish for the death of me and my family which is something he avoided.

There's widespread delusion within the Arab world that Israel will topple. Even supposedly intelligent western Muslims are influenced by this delusion. They have an image of the country that doesn't represent it in any way.

Add to that the justified Israeli paranoia e.g. in the 1950's the UK drafted plans to bomb Israeli airbases and leave Israel without defense against its enemies. If Israel were wiped out in any time during its existence the Jews would end up like the Armenians. Fed. We're seeing this in the states right now where the hate towards Israel is one of the few bipartisan issues. We saw America abandon allies in the past.

> The world didn't start on October 7th. How many Palestinians were killed by the IDF prior to October 7th? This is from 4 months earlier than that event: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/06/israel-opt-ci...

Sure. How many Israelis were killed by Hamas and similar terrorist groups?

Prior to Oct 7th Israel tried to be more surgical when targeting terrorists. That worked. The PLO was a deadly organization that murdered children, hijacked planes and killed athletes at the Olympics. Israel was deeply violent chasing them to Lebanon and Tunis. That broke them. They finally understood that Israel will never surrender and took up the low bar of recognizing its right to exist/stop terrorism.

That led to the one positive thing in Palestinian history: The Oslo accords.

But Hamas couldn't have that and sabotaged that with help from the extreme Israeli right-wing.

This can't be solved by peaceful means, as much as I want that. In order to have peace we need to also stop the people who are trying actively to sabotage the peace and we also need to squash that delusion that Israel could collapse.

> Working as an Aviation C2 officer, I understand the killchain of air support missions, which is why I'm highly critical of how much ordnance is landing on the heads of entire families. The Israeli air force has a reputation for competence, so the only rational explanation is malevolence.

The assumption your making is about civilian death ratios published by Hamas controlled sources. The fact that other organizations put their stamp of approval on these sources doesn't make them true. Israel doesn't publish numbers since it's impossible to get them accurately, but they estimate a ratio of 1 to 1 in terms of civilian casualties which is far better than what any US campaign ever achieved.

Here's a countryman of yours with a different take on this: https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urb...

> The implication in this statement is that you aren't making every sortie count now....which is coherent with the conclusion that you are bombing the population as punishment, not judiciously targeting actual military threats.

Israel is using more accurate smaller bombs right now. Are some decisions made by soldiers biased and vengeful, sure. I mean Abu Ghraib didn't appear out of a void and Israel still is a country of laws, it prosecutes war crimes. Yes, the current right-wing government is terrible in that regard and tries to sabotage due process/military standards. But the army is still a separate branch with its own chain of command and judicial oversight. Every airstrike is reviewed, by oversight and requires justification.

I can see why the level of destruction is terrible, but I also understand the necessity. Imagine as a soldier walking into a neighborhood with snipers in every building. The army chose the brute force approach in many cases to reduce casualties.

> It's not the quantity of aid that is significant, it is the purpose, process, and optics of aid delivery.

I agree that holding the food trucks was terrible. No excuse, even if it helps Hamas that was a terrible call. The floatila nonsense was just constructed to make Israel look bad on social media. It was stupid to begin with.

> Members of the international community are attempting to relieve human suffering

They are not. They are virtue signaling which is a very different thing. Ultimately they are only increasing hostility and making it harder for everyone.

Greta Thunberg is the perfect example of a person who celebrated Oct 7th right after it happened. The way we see it is that no one gives a f

ck about dead Israelis. The problem is that the moment she put herself as the person who's for "bringing aid" she made the whole thing toxic. That means that when we say we want aid to go in we're on "her side". She damaged the cause rather than helped in the name of social media "likes".

> and you are boarding their ships, shooting them, and attacking them with drones.

You're mixing several different floatila's. The first one had armed personnel trying to break a legal blockade. They shot Israeli soldiers and found out. That was legitimate.

The drone thing tried to prevent a similar occurrence. No one was hurt and the message was received.

The latest floatilla was just stupid social media idiots. They got due process and a flight back home. Those who want their day in court will get due process like everyone.

It looks bad, but it's people trying to make Israel look bad. Not an objectively bad or evil thing.

> We have a lot of criticism because you are killing women and children

Not actually true. The ratio of women/children is faked.

> using OUR taxpayer dollars, protected by OUR diplomatic influence with the UN/ICC/etc.

That's partially true. Yes, Israel does get US aid which is given in the form of "store credit". It provides a lot in return for the financial/political aid. In fact the whole situation in Gaza is because of you guys...

In 2005 Bush pressured Israel to leave Gaza and clear the settlements. It did just that because of your political pressure. The results of that terrible decision are in front of us right now. For the past two decades Israel didn't re-invade fully despite constant escalation and rockets. Again, the reason is pressure from the USA not to do anything too harsh.

Removing US aid and international support will be a terrible problem to Israel. That is literally what Hamas wants. The problem is that this would imply that the leash is truly off. It would send Israel to the extreme right and would probably create a "shock and awe" scenario for Palestinians.

I hope the US aid stays but I'm pretty sure it will be gone within a decade. I hope we can have peace before that happens.