Funny story, I was mistaken for an Israeli patriot today, just because of my accent and what I was wearing. I was reassured, if you like, that the world is not going to ostracise Israel and Israel will keep existing. That was the gist of it anyhow. Of course I have no doubt israel will keep existing, what with all the support of the world’s hegemons. What worries me is that Israel will keep existing in its current form: a fascist, genocidal ethnostate. Describing the only armed resistance against occupation permitted by Israel to take hold, as an ‘army’, creates a false sense of equivalence between Hamas’s militants and the IDF with all its powerful tech. To describe what’s been going on in Gaza for the past 10 months as a war between two armies simply defending their own people is, well stunning, when faced with all the evidence of the IDF’s targeted mass killings of Palestinian civilian lives, as well as their callous disregard for Israeli lives (eg Hannibal directive).

First what needs to happen is the US stop unconditionally funding the IDF.

Do you see any scenario where the IDF can allow itself to truly stop Innocent people? A soldier is being fired at from a school, should the soldier allow himself to get killed in such situation?

The whole concept is bankrupt. An IDF soldier is being fired at from a school because he is on Palestinian land, occupying it by force to maintain the land that was stolen from the Palestinians and facilitate the taking of more.

There are degrees. If he’s sniping schoolchildren, then that will inflame the conflict more and promote more October 7ths. If he’s “only” firing back at the school, so “defending” himself… well, it’s “better” I guess, but if you break in my house in the middle of the night and I attack you, you’re not “defending” yourself even if you limit yourself to fighting with me and not hurting my wife.

And vice versa, considering what you know about setlers in Israel, do you really think that they will not get even more violent in the west bank if they know that their actions has no cost?

Their actions don’t seem to have a cost though. Or rather the mechanism of retribution is so indirect and random that I don’t think that Hamas’s counterattacks make all that much difference to their calculus of what they can get away with doing to the Palestinians. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression.

And don’t get me wrong, I wish for Hamas to vanish, and I wish for the IDF to kill only militants (even that definition is not clear), just like you. But I don’t see any realistic scenario (considering the human spirit) that this can happen. Not in the current political situation.

Like I said, even “killing only militants” leaves Israel in the position of the war criminal. They are invading and stealing homes, farms, anything they can find and pushing the Palestinians into a vanishingly small series of refuges which they then invade in turn. Why would “militants” not fight back in that scenario? What should they do instead?

I do agree with your take on how unrealistic peace is in the present climate. It needs to be imposed from outside by force in order to happen, which won’t happen, because the US would need to be actively involved in making that happen and the US likes things more or less as they are (or at least as they were before the counterattack after October 7th got so genocidal that it started causing political issues for leaders in the US).