Streamwave

You aren't being clever by doubling down on an antisemitic canard.

Gaza has restrictions from israel since 1967

Sure. So what? For the next 10 years it averaged nearly 10% GDP growth per year.

The more tight restrictions get, the more hate there will be feom the affected people.

I think this rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the conditions in Gaza pre-October 7th.

Gaza was pretty wealthy. The average income exceeded that of their neighbouring Egyptians. Yes there were difficulties importing some goods or products, but it was rarely impossible for consumer goods. Plus, in the end, they (as we now know) had miles of smuggling tunnels.

That's one reason why Egypt started squealing when Israel began to move into Rafah. There were minimal civilian casualties, but the IDF discovered the vast tunnels, some big enough to move a tank through, between Rafah and Egypt.

The idea that everyone was sort of sitting around in tents and mud is nonsense.

They also received billions of dollars in international aid, which Hamas of course simply spent building weapons and terror dungeons. But many Gazans went to work in Israel, many went to university abroad, built decent lives. All undone because of Hamas, tragically.

Watch this tourism video by a Gazan from 2019. Does this look like a Warsaw Ghetto to you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBo7i-TXy6s

Yes times could be tough. But times are often tough all around the world. Ask the Sudanese or the Ethiopians. They've got average incomes multiple times lower than the Gazans did. They didn't launch genocidal wars or broadcast TV shows for children calling for beheading al-Yahud.

OK

The blockade was instituted in response to the Gazans electing Hamas in free and fair, internationally monitored democratic elections, and then beginning to fire rockets at Israel, to try and reduce their ability to import weapons or components which could be used to create weapons.

There didn't even used to be a wall. Before Hamas, you could just drive from Tel Aviv to the beaches of Gaza and back with no checkpoints.

A lot of Palestinians miss those days. I'm pretty sure most Israelis do, too.

Sure, I'm aware that I'm better informed on this than most people are who just rely on ambient vibes and prejudices. I'm not challenging that.

Neither the Gazans nor the Arabs of Palestinians have spent 70 years having their land and lives stolen. This sort of superficial analysis is commonplace in the West but bears no relation to the historical reality of the conditions under which the State of Israel came into existence.

The best account, drawing especially on the work of Benny Morris and more recent scholars, was given in a lecture by political analyst Haviv Rettig Gur here.

Yes, I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that Israel alone among all the countries in the world, including Syria (where Assad slaughtered more than half a million Syrians), China (engaged in the genocide of the Uyghurs) and Azerbaijan (who literally ethnically cleansed Nagorno-Karabakh of Armenians just last year), is the only one accused of being bloodthirsty child-murderers who regard non-Jewish children as less than human.

Couldn't be that a key theme of antisemitism over 2,000 years retains a deep hold on people's imaginations and biases, influencing their views today even if they aren't fully cognisant of, could it?

Nah. It's just a coincidence that it's only the Jewish state accused of this.

Well, no, not overnight. There'd need to be a denazification process similar to what took place in Germany and Japan after the Second World War. The only people who know how to do that with a Muslim population are the Saudis and Emiratis, who succeeded in deradicalising their own populations in the decades following 9/11.

They'd play a central role in managing the civil administration of Gaza while that was given time to show fruits. It would obviously be far too early for any sort of democracy in Gaza, but it's a goal to strive towards in the long term.

An 'ethnostate' significantly more ethnically and religiously diverse than any country in Europe, the Middle East or Asia.

Japan is 99% ethnic Yamato Japanese. Is Japan an ethnostate? And should they be criticised for this?

73% of Israelis are Jews, more than half of which are Middle Eastern (Mizrahi) Jews, i.e. zero connection to Europe. The other 27% of Israeli citizens are usually Arabs who are either Muslim, Christian, Druze, Bedouin, Circassians, Baha’i, Armenians, Samaritans, etc. They have the same civil, legal, political and religious rights as Jewish Israelis. They’re represented at every level of government, including in the parliament with an explicitly Arabist political party that has once served in a coalition government.

And it’s… Israel that’s the ‘ethnostate’. Got it.

Accusing Jews of being unable to stop themselves from murdering children is unambiguous antisemitism with a long history dating back to the Middle Ages.

what do you mean by that?

I mean how the occupation can end. It's not obvious how that can happen, even though it obviously should. Go on Google Images, then search 'topography of Israel and the West Bank'. If a nascent civilian government of Palestine falls to Hamas or similar forces then they'd be overlooking Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They'd have a throughline to Iran via Syria-Lebanon. That's not a risk Israel can take.

Hamas has little to no influence there

This simply isn't correct. Hamas operates in much of the West Bank, as do allied groups like the Jenin Brigades and Lion's Den in Nablus. They're also enormously popular among West Bank Palestinians.

it is governed by a civilian government that was democratically elected

So democratic that the current President Abbas is currently serving the 19th year of his 4-year term.

In fact, they’ve been trying to hold new elections, something that Israel has been blocking for years now

This is misleading at best. They're not trying to hold new elections, because every single opinion poll for about 15 years now show that Fatah would lose badly and certainly Hamas would become the new government of the West Bank, which would finally shatter the possibility of there ever being a Palestinian state. That doesn't serve Fatah or Israel. Israel therefore keeps Fatah on life-support as the least-bad option.

There is little to no violence coming from the West Bank.

Because it's been suppressed by Fatah in co-operation with Israeli security services who've been operating in the West Bank before and after October 7th.

By the way, right at this moment thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank are out marching in support of Hamas and against the killing of Ismail Hainyeh: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/dismay-in-gaza-and-rare-open-support-for-hamas-in-west-bank-after-haniyeh-killing/

Any outcome where Hamas was permitted to live after October 7th or to govern Gaza was never going to be acceptable, and Hamas was unlikely to ever concede this.

Anything less than the end of Hamas would have been a terrible outcome for all sides. They’d regroup, rearm, and in a few years’ time they’d attack again, more civilians would die, and people would start clutching their pearls and warning about ‘escalation’. And in the meantime, the Palestinians in Gaza would have had to endure their brutal rule.

Once Hamas has been sufficiently degraded, there’ll be some sort of regional coalition to rebuild Gaza with Saudi, Emirati and Kuwaiti involvement and US security guarantees, a deradicalisation process for the Palestinians there, and the construction of a civil bureaucracy. The international community will be pouring in financial assistance, except that this time it won’t be used to build hundreds of miles of terror dungeons.

The West Bank is a tougher nut to crack. But Israel will have to deal with the Hezbollah Jihadis first.