Better Than Mutual Annhiliation.
Ok, here’s a framework proposal for Israel/Palestine that at least to me makes sense, though crude and not fleshed out with detail. Let the experts do that.
First, the major premises:
. Israel will never agree to disarm unilaterally
. Thus, two co-equal states can’t fly
. Neither party will make peace voluntarily due to their dysfunction and pathology
. Most of their respective previous demands must be met
. The international community made this mess, it has to fix it
. World peace and security is jeopardized with the current state of conflict
So, here goes:
. An international intervention, first offered voluntarily and if denied, forced on the two parties…probably with the UN as a peacekeeping force but with major trusted groups from both sides providing the reorganization: ie: the Arab League, UN and maybe NATO.
. Create a single, unitary Israeli/Palestinian State.
. The New national government has co-equal Jewish/Arab legislative, judicial and executive representation. The President and Prime Minister alternative between Israeli and Palestinian (Arab and Jew) each election cycle; equal seats in Knesset and courts, irrespective of ultimate ethnic mix irrespective of population growths in each category.
. The right of Palestinian return honored, using international funding and housing starting with relocation of refugees and settlers and reuse of settlements for the Palestinian refugees.
. Temporarily demilitarize Israel and disarm Palestinians.
. The single state is given a new constitution protecting all the citizenship and religious rights of both Palestinians, Israelis, Jews and Muslims, likely within ’67 borders.
. Restore a national single state military after stabilization and withdrawl of occupying peacekeepers for future defense against outside attack or internal insurrection.
. Similar co-equal governance of Jerusalem, but to include Christian representation.
. Equal protection of all religious/ethnic groups.
. Those on either side unwilling to abide by such a construct are offered immunity and relocation elsewhere in the world.
. The international community provides military and economic security until the country and economy is restarted.
Tags: Featured
…and then I woke up.
I disagree with your premise and quick dismissal of a two-state solution. Your proposal also defeats the main point of having a Jewish state. Supposedly the U.S. has equal protection of all religious groups, right? How’s that working out? Also, are you honoring the right of return for the approx. 800,000 Israeli Jews to go back to their homes throughout the MENA region?
And Israel’s nuclear weapon stockpile?
Or… we could simply get rid of Saddam Hussein and Jeffersonian Democracy will take root in Iraq and quickly spread throughout the middle east.
Ezra, why wouldn’t the new state be a Jewish state? No, not exclusively since it would include Palestinian Arabs, but it includes Arabs now and all sorts of Jews; religious, orthodox, secular and is state welcoming and sustaining Jews. Is exclusivity your issue?
We have equal protection under the law here and though there’s plenty of bigotry among U.S. religious groups, we mostly don’t kill one another.
As for the 800,000, anyone displaced by partitioning/67 wars et all would have the right of return, which can include Jews, who were not so displaced during that period.
Nuclear stockpile……gone.
Why don’t we just look the other way as Israel chokes off Gaza with blockades and destroys power and water infrastructure, turning the place into such a hell hole that the people will want to escape to fun loving Syria?
…Oh wait!
…Isn’t that what we’re doing? Isn’t that what we call supporting Israel 100%!!
You forget that the blockade dates only to 2007 and is a response to terrorist activities and declarations by Hamas. Egypt maintains the blockade because it too is threatened by Hamas. Israel has begun incremental loosening of the blockade for humanitarian goods on multiple occasions since 2007, but each time was met by fresh abuses by Hamas. Hamas has not been capable of responsibly governing imports, choosing war and war materials instead. Even the UN in Gaza can no longer be trusted. Israel cannot be expected to cater the war against itself.
Any other nation would be commended for exhausting the use of economic sanctions before resorting to arms. But not Israel, why is that?
The blockade is an outrage but your outrage is misdirected. Gazans can improve their own conditions by expelling Hamas or asking the international community to help it do so.
@p “…and is a response to terrorist activities…”
You say that like it’s an excuse for escalation. The only reason that they engage in “terrorist activities” is that they don’t have proper weapon systems. Frankly, the terror they generate is far less than the actual terror created by the advanced weapon systems employed by Israel. That’s true terror.
Look… You have a mismatched war, like so many in history. It’s like watching a fight between an unruly teenager and a nasty 5-year old kid. The teenager should know better. The onus for peace lies with Israel. They are the only ones who can achieve this. The fact that they have failed can be attributed to:
1. Incompetence
2. Evil
Take your pick.
Frankly, I’d rather see them clear out Gaza, than to see what they’re actually doing.
This from my dear and long time Houston friend, now well into his 90’s. We’re political opposites and love to debate….usually while eating ! He is a gourmet chef, hugely successful in business, a 7th generation Texan, Jewish and a Texas Aggie which is a huge anomaly. He’s a decorated vet of WWII. Bob relearned Hebrew and got into his religion for the first time in his 70’s studying for his second bar mitzvah and is a serious historian. We agree on practically nothing but love one another.
Robert A Epstein
Ok, Stan. You finally hit my hot button. I can restrain myself no longer. There is not one political, geographical, historical, geopolitical reason for there to be a Palestine. There never has been a country called Palestine. Never a king, queen, head of state, meets and bounds, or organized constitution by-laws. The name Palestine was a name given to Judaea and Samaria as the most despicable name they could think of after the Bar Kochba rebellion in 151 AD. It was designed to infuriate the Jews living in that region. The area was known as the Holy Land, and did not become identified as Palestine until the British Mandate in 1917. The last legitimate government in the area was Israel. Inspite of being under the control of many Arab and Muslim occupancies, none of them set up a state called Palestine. There was no people called Palestinians until Yasser Arafat came on the scene in 1984. The Koran never mentions Jerusalem one time. The Torah mentions Jerusalem over 750 times. When Jews pray, they face Jerusalem. When Muslims pray, they face Mecca. The reason this conflict has been going on in the final analysis, a state of Palestine is just wrong, and there is no reason for one to exist. Everyone in their heart of hearts knows this.
I’m all for self-determination of a people. But that’s not what Hamas is about. It’s about destruction and hatred. There can be no Palestine as long as Hamas and its members exist. They were given the chance to govern constructively, and chose to go back to killing the neighbors because they don’t like the way the neighbors pray.
Blindly foolish to think that anyone other than the Israelis and Palestinians can fix their co-existence problem.
If history teaches anything it is that well intentioned diplomats imposing politically expedient Band-Aid solutions will never leave a lasting peace in their wake. Rather both Israel and the Palestinians must, of their own accord and desire, abandon their genetically ingrained self-righteous, tit-for-tat, victim identity, that give rise to the politics of willing atrocity. Unless and until they do the entire conflict weary world should expect more failure, expect routine atrocity, expect ongoing religious terrorism, expect the conflict to invade every corner of the world.
What we know from 70 plus years of trying is that neither national self interest, common sense, logic, obvious self-preservation, the welfare their own children, sacrifice for future generations, nor prayers to their respective God, or all the money in the US treasury, or even rainbow power, etc., has worked. Failure will be inevitable unless and until the Israelis and Palestinians make their own peace. They need to find their own diamonds.
@sm “There is not one political, geographical, historical, geopolitical reason for there to be a Palestine.”
How about the fact that there are 1,800,000 people living in Gaza, yearning to be free?
That seems like a pretty darn good reason!
Your cited mumbo-gumbo historical arguments totally ignore the facts on the ground. They couldn’t be more irrelevant.
The problem is, despite the wonderful qualities and pathos of most of those 1,800,000, modern Gaza has always used any “freedom” to harbor weapons and terrorists who actively plot against its neighbors. Israel has tried non-violent sanctions many times previously. There is no reason to believe Hamas will not take advantage of any new freedoms to hatch more terrorism. If Gazans want state freedoms they will have to accept state accountability.
When will the international community stop clutching its pearls and instead bring solutions to help contain and suppress Hamas weapons, tunnels, and plots?
The best we can hope for is containment and isolation of the problem to Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Israel lost the moral high ground many years ago, so they get lumped in with the non-existent people who formerly lived in the area now known as Israel (non-existent because, like the Bedouins, if you don’t live within political borders recognized by other nations, you don’t actually exist as a people). Hey, maybe Israel would be willing to count the Bedouins as 3/5 of an Israeli and maybe not raze their not formally recognized villages, cause as everyone knows Bedouins are nomadic and don’t actually live in villages, just tents and tents are not like real places, just camps. Yeah, that’s it.
I find it particularly galling that anyone in the world with a certain ethnicity has a “birthright” to take a free trip to Israel, but the non-existent peoples who have lived in the area for centuries have walls, checkpoints, and fences that keep them from even essential medical care.
At this point, someone would need to make a case for why we should care about either side. I’d rather spend my money feeding hungry children in far flung places that don’t have lobbying organizations, or any rights after birth, or medical care, or a bed to sleep in at night.
Mr Elite wrote:
So, your complaint is that it isn’t a fair fight, that it would somehow be better if the Arabs had more and better weapons, and were able to inflict as much destruction on Israel as the Israelis are on them?
Had that been done in 1967, following the Six Day War, we wouldn’t be seeing this problem today. However, I think that the window for that kind of action passed long ago.
Dana, your argument assumes that Israeli Jews and Muslim Palestinians are incapable of living together… as if they just arent advanced enough to understand.
Also…. You keep mentioning the “Arabs” should have been kicked out…. Trail of Tear/ Krystalnacht style… I don’t think you understand a vital point. Just because the Palestinians are ARABS, doesn’t mean Jordanians, Lebanese, Egyptians etc would have allowed them refuge. (actually, that statement is backed up by historical fact)
So, please elaborate. If the “Arabs” had been sent away by a nation that never existed until 1948, where would they have gone? Do you even care?
Mr Elite wrote:
Actually, that’s all of the reason that there needs to be, but that is the reason for a two-state solution . . . and Hamas don’t want that.
If the Palestinians were able to accept Israel and agree on a two-state solution, they could have their independence rather quickly. The plan already exists, agreed to by Israel in 2000, but rejected by Yassir Arafat. I’d guess that the majority of Palestinians would agree to it, but the Hamas leadership will not, and as long as the Palestinians allow Hamas to run things, it can’t happen.
If a two-state solution, on something close to the 1967 borders, was agreed to, the Israelis would think that they had won — there would be a few irredentists who’d see the loss of “Greater Israel” as a loss, but they aren’t anywhere close to a majority — but a substantial portion of the Arabs would see it as a loss, the permanent loss of what they see as their land to the Jews.
And that’s a large part of why the Arabs don’t like or trust us. Even if all we support is an Israel restricted to the 1967 borders, we are still supporting Israel winning and the Arabs losing. The fact that we’re the colonial descendants of the British certainly doesn’t help with the Arabs’ opinion of us.
Ben wrote:
Actually, I don’t think that they are capable of living together in peace, and there’s a lot of evidence to support that. In the Arab nations, you have Sunnis and Shi’a, ethnically identical, killing each other over differences within Islam, something certainly not as different as that between Islam and Judaism. In the Balkans, we had several different ethnic groups who lived together, for two generations, in an enforced peace, but it only took a couple of hard-heads to inflame the old hatreds. In Ireland, there’s still strife between Catholics and Anglicans over 300-year-old history. And the Jews are back in Israel because, after 1800 years of living side-by-side, some supposedly good Christians and Westerners thought it would be a good idea to kill all the Jews.
So no, I really don’t think it’s probable that the Israelis and Arabs can live together in peace and harmony.
“And the Jews are back in Israel because, after 1800 years of living side-by-side, some supposedly good Christians and Westerners thought it would be a good idea to kill all the Jews.”
Are you kidding me? you think the Holocaust was the FIRST time European Christians did something bad to the Jews? I certainly hope you know more about world history than that comment lets on.
There is one other trend in all those people you pointed out… they are all poor. They all live in countries that are exploited by powerful outside entities. You can blame Islam if you want, but I blame western nations and, especially in the case of the Middle East, oil companies.
Ben, I’m very aware of the sordid history of anti-Semitism in the West, through which the Jews gamely soldiered on; the Holocaust was simply the final straw.
And your obvious knowledge of anti-Semitism undercuts your own explanation that those areas “are all poor.” The Dreyfus Affair occurred in France, which was as wealthy as anyplace at the time. Many of the anti-Semitic episodes down through European history were pushed by wealthy people who owed money to Jewish lenders, who then thought a good way out of their debts was to expel or kill their creditors.
In the good ol’ US of A, wealthy as we were, we turned away a ship of Jewish refugees during World War II.
But, a final point is that, if you believe it’s because those areas “are all poor,” you have to remember that the Palestinians are poor, dirt poor. The Israelis are fairly well-to-do, but all that means is that the Palestinians resent them even more.
Of course, that’s one of the problems with the two-state solution as well: a newly independent Palestine will not be any wealthier than the Palestinian areas are now. The Palestinian areas are resource-poor, their educational system is terrible, and the oil-wealthy Arab nations pay them a lot of lip service, but give them precious little actual assistance. A newly independent Palestine is going to be full of poor people who will still be blaming their plight on Israel.
@D “I think that the window for that kind of action passed long ago.”
Just give them weapons and food and drop them into Syria.
That would solve three very different problems.
A friend of mine asked me to look at this, to see what I thought (she thought it was a promising idea).
The thing that mosts interests me is how murderous it is. Something called the “international community” is going to–“first offered voluntarily and if denied, forced on the two parties”–impose a solution.
So let’s see..on the one hand you have Hamas, uncompromising fanatics, supported by another set of uncompromising fanatics, the Iranians, who will never submit to this voluntarily, as the Israelis are demonstrating right now, so they will have to be exterminated, and as they fight in the midst of civilians, tens of thousands of them will have to be slaughtered as well.
On the other side, we have the Israelis. Israel is itself just a giant refugee camp, made up of refugees from all over Europe and the Arab lands, who, according to this brilliant plan, are going to be disarmed and forced to live among people who have sworn to annhilate them, with absoutely no way to defend themselves from them.
So let’s assume the Israelis won’t surrender voluntariy either.
Also, they have nuclear weapons.
So after Hamas and the Palestinians have been destroyed, and after a massive war against the Israelis has been concluded with the loss of oh, say three or four million people on both sides…we declare Peace!
Great plan.
” Israel is itself just a giant refugee camp”
Yep most refugee camps have a nuclear weapon stockpiles. That’s how you can tell they are refugee camps!
If you wanted to make a point it might have been wise to refrain from such hyperbole. Honestly, you jumped the shark with that one.
Actually, I think Joe made some good points.. Hyperbolic, yes… but this is the interwebz… it’s nothing if not “flashy”
If the international community does anything they should at least ratchet up the pressure on Israel to abandon the West Bank settlements, give up Greater Israel, and get the West Bank back on the path to statehood. I really don’t see any way for Gaza to be part of that, due to their political and geographic discontinuity with the rest of the PA.
Gaza is never going to be a nation-state due to its size and geographic encirclement by Israel. The best it can hope for is to be a semi-autonomous district within Israel with full economic participation (or perhaps Egypt), and that would be a very good outcome. While I could imagine most Palestinians accepting that, there would always be an element that wants war. Unfortunately that is the element that runs Gaza right now.
When Gaza and the West Bank were supposed to become a single Palestinian nation, there was (supposedly) going to be a traffic corridor between the two sections of the new Palestine. I’m not sure how that would work in the current environment; maybe a massive freeway, perhaps with a rest area in the middle, cordoned off by concrete walls and concertina wire?
Before the 1967 war, neither the West Bank nor Gaza were nations; the West Bank was part of Jordan, while Gaza was part of Egypt.
My point about it being a “giant refugee camp” was not that it was not a nation, but rather that the people who came from there have nowhere else to go and come from centuries of persecution, half of them at the hands of Muslims. They are not going to simply “surrender” their weapons, because they know what awaits them if they do.
Joe Y, what part of disarming both sides, inserting peacekeeping forces (ie: UN, NATO), then rearming when the new single state is operational did you miss?
Are you not aware that if the occupation ends, Palestinians given their political and personal freedoms and citizenship rights, much of the anger in the rest of the middle east over this issue will subside if not end? Is it your view that non-jews in the region just simply hate jews without causal factors such as partitioning, colonialism, occupation?
Stan-You write as if you’re unaware of everything else that is going on in the Middle East, absolutely none of which has anything to do with Israel. The chief Palestinian organizations, particularly Hamas, which is quite explicit, has made it clear they will never tolerate Jews in Israel, of any sort, any more than their coreligionists in other MIddle Eastern states can tolerate Christians, Bahai, Druse, or Muslims of different types than themselves.
Check out my friend Nick Cooper’s article on the history of ethnic cleansing in the Occupied territories. It includes some vividly graphic maps of the transition from 1917 forward.
Joe Y, do you not see the similarity between the outrageous Caliphate being created by ISIS (ISIL) and this history? The overwhelming majority of Palestinians and other Arab/non-Jewish middle east residents are not supporters of this crew, Hamas or Hezbollah, or other radical Islamic groups than are Israeli’s supporters of hard righ Orthodox settlement occupiers or American’s of hard right Christian fundamentalists.
http://www.freepresshouston.com/the-not-so-mysterious-reason-for-the-israel-palestine-conflict/
I don’t know how much “ethnic cleansing” there could be, since Israel/Palestine was virtually unpopulated until fairly recently (see Twain’s “The Innocents Abroad” for example), but that’s not really my point, which is that the activity in the Middle East outside of Israel is unrelated to the events in Israel and that the plan outlined above would require a massive war with tremendous destruction and death.
I don’t know how to interpret “virtually unpopulated” but in 1915 there were 590,000 arabs/muslims and 83,000 jews; during the British Mandate period, 1945-1,061,270 arabs/muslims and 553,600 jews, a 2-1 ratio of the arab majority.; then with the UN Partition, 700,000 arabs left; it exploded with Jewish immigration after that, now about 6 million jews an 1.7 million arabs/muslims. Seems like a lot of population to me, especially arabs.
As for your crystal ball that there would be a bloodbath (yet another one), could be the outcome, which of course subverts the single state intention; so, we’ve got a fallback proposal long on the table for a two state solution, but I think unlikely that the Israelis would agree to a provision for a military in the new Palestinian state or that the new Palestinian state would agree to such a provision, at least, not for long. So,the predictors of a stalemate may be right.
The Israelis have already agreed–three times I believe–to a two-state solution, encompassing everything you say. The Palestinians refusal to go along is why Clinton hated Arafat so much.
Hamas and Fatah will never agree to a solution, and Hamas has made its genocidal intentions a part of its charter.
Any Palestinian leader who signed such a treaty would be assasinated in any case, as happened to those who wanted to deal with the Jews in Palestine before 1947.
I do think of your population figures for an area the size of Israel as virtually unpopulated, so we have a definiton differentiation here.
No argument that Hamas has genocidal intentions. But the P.L.O. in the past has agreed to recognition. In fact, Abbas, speaking not only for the P.L.O. but also the Unity government with Hamas, as recently as April 2014, has repeated recognition as a condition for peace. Hamas must be dealt with, especially by the Palestinian majority……as no one trusts their accession to the P.L.O. in this Unity project. But you’re simply factually wrong about recognition. The majority on both sides are sick of this conflict; the right wing in each case are the spoilers and can be outvoted on both sides.
I do agree completely that the majority on both sides are sick of it, but the Israelis have shown a willingness to make a viable two-state solution–Gaza itself was given virtual indpendence and an effective economy in 2005 (Gaza was going to be the “Mediterranean Singapore”)–and Hamas, which was elected showed no interest in building a country, just in carrying out its lunatic war with Israel.
Likud opposes a two state solution, you will never see one unless the power shifts in Israel. Israel has been playing a dangerous game, keeping Hamas just strong enough to weaken at first the PLO and now the Palestinian Authority. This latest invasion has strenghtened support for both Hamas and Likud both of whom relish conflict. As in all war, civilians suffer the most
PP wrote:
Unfortunately, it was the Chairman of the PLO, Yassir Arafat, who rejected the 2000 deal that President Clinton negotiated.
But, to get back to your original article, I really don’t see how peace can be imposed from outside. If all parties don’t want peace, it’ll never happen.
Interesting alternative view from Daniel Greenfield:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/07/obamas-gaza-game.html
“Netanyahu has chosen to extend the operation against Hamas. Backing him up are poll numbers which show that the vast majority of Israelis want the job done. The PLO now suspects that Obama is about to back a Hamas coup against it. And Egypt’s military has gotten a lot of recent experience watching Obama’s botched diplomatic strategies blow up in his face.
The real objective of this war was to undermine Egypt. Egypt was supposed to scramble into the new alignment by developing closer ties with Hamas and cutting a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood.”
I remain pro-Israel — even _more_ so now, after lurking and reading some of the comments here.
“The real objective of this war was to undermine Egypt.”
And what would any discussion be without a conspiracy, offered up by someone who references a website that has been quoted by such a stellar cast of informed and critical thinkers.
“Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Allen West, Lou Dobbs, Dick Morris, Ed Driscoll, The Blaze, National Review and FOX News”
Don’t you have something from Alex Jones? You mean the current situation isn’t a false flag operation? Surely Obama is getting ready to declare martial law. Is there a packing list available for the trip to the FEMA camps?
Another interesting take:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/did-iran-scuttle-ceasefire-gaza_800476.html
“Ninety minutes into the 72-hour unconditional ceasefire announced this morning, Hamas launched a suicide attack in which two IDF soldiers were killed and another was kidnapped. Word on the ground in Israel is that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, rather than Hamas, may be responsible for the operation.”
Y’all realize, I hope, that not only is it not up to the readers of this blog to figure out a solution, none of you will be solicited for opinions if and when someone gets around to putting a stop to this.
Nowhere in any Delaware discussion of the issue have I seen someone propose taking a direct action — for example, picketing the offices of Sen. Coons, an outspoken supporter of “Israel right or wrong.”
Were such an event to occur, I would be happy to promote it in whatever way I can.
Geezer, Pacem in terra had announced at least one protest outside I think Sen. Coon’s office last week and I think the paper ran a picture of some young Gaza supporters.
Sadly, most of the recent posts have been from the freeper crowd with all kinds of nonsense, genocidal proposals to rid us of the “Palestinian Vermin” and conspiracy theories.
My original blog had asked for solutions before I gave one. But, we soldier on…..
@gdgm+
With just 500,000 people the density at the time of partition was 90 people per square mile. The 2014 density for the entire United States is 89.5 people per square mile which would make the United States “virtually unpopulated” as well. Your “definiton differentiation” is actually a definition deficit and total nonsense. I have no doubt such crap is necessary to rationalize your beliefs, but I wish you would refrain from trying to sell it to everyone else.
” I have no doubt such crap is necessary to rationalize your beliefs, but I wish you would refrain from trying to sell it to everyone else.”
You go, Dave!
@Dana: Unfortunately, it was the Chairman of the PLO, Yassir Arafat, who rejected the 2000 deal that President Clinton negotiated.
Dana conveniently forgets that the 2000 deal which Arafat rejected included that Israel would have total authority over Jerusalem.
Is it any surprise that he would reject that, Dana?
And since then, how does Dana justify all of the incursions which Israelis have made into the West Bank, which is Palestinian territory?
And is Dana supportive of the fact that Palestinians who live in Israel have no vote, even though they are in the majority?
There’s a word for that, Dana: apartheid
Not that I for one second excuse Hamas’ extremism, I hold Israelis somewhat responsible, given my comments above.
In hindsight, the collapse of the Clinton initiative in 2000 was a tragedy of major proportions, as we have seen since, and especially now!
On the off chance that gdgm is interested in actual facts, here is the Palestine Census of October 23, 1922. On page 3 you will note that there 757,182 people Palestine only 4 years after the area was apparently found to be “virtually unpopulated.”
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/yabber/census/PalestineCensus1922.pdf
One more interesting perspective, this from the New York _Times_:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/world/middleeast/fighting-political-islam-arab-states-find-themselves-allied-with-israel.html?_r=0
“Battling Palestinian militants in Gaza two years ago, Israel found itself pressed from all sides by unfriendly Arab neighbors to end the fighting.
Not this time.
After the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip. That, in turn, may have contributed to the failure of the antagonists to reach a negotiated cease-fire even after more than three weeks of bloodshed.
“The Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under several presidents.”
As to ‘Dave’, why the anger over my postings? “Here’s an interesting take on this” isn’t “selling” you anything. What I’m *guessing* is, that you would like me to be more positive towards Hamas. (And since Hamas is one of multiple parties in Palestine, not every Palestinian chose them.) I cannot support Hamas — I stand with Israel.
I care nothing for either side, except the children who suffer. I mean seriously nothing.
Children, whose very identity as a people you deny, are dying. So you can stand with whomever you wish and tell yourself whatever lets you sleep at night.
And even though Hamas is on the side of wrong, that doesn’t make you or Israel on the side of right. A moral people do not act as if the death of children is acceptable collateral damage.