Comment by weatherlite
1 year ago
> An occasional October 7th is a better choice than levelling Gaza is
Better for who? For Hamas yes, killing Israelis with impunity would be a boost. But for Israel - I don't know of any democracy that can keep going with an 'occasional' October 7th. A country can't sustain that without collapsing at some point. Think about 9-11 but with 80k killed instead of 3000, and around 10000 kidnapped. And the entity responsible is just around the corner and gonna keep doing it on occasion. Those are the proportions. How many of these would the U.S be able to endure before its economy and society collapsed?
Then we'll deal with that "at some point" I guess? Again, Israel is a bad guy too. It's all bad guys. All options suck. So pick the one with less death and just shuffle along until some unknown event in the far future acts to break the stalemate and produce a peaceful region (or, more realistically, acts to break the equilibrium and we get a genuine demographic disaster that returns the area to a "single ethnicity" state, which sucks even more, but may be unavoidable).
Tough love: Israel can't expect to continue to act as it has in the decades since the fall of the PA. It ultimately depends on international support and that support will eventually run out, c.f. the linked article. It won't happen soon, or all at once, but it will happen and there needs to be a plan for regional coexistence, and as you'd surely agree there really isn't one beyond an imagined (and largely impossible) total military victory.