Targeting civilians is bad.

Terrorists, including those who target civilians, are combatants, and are valid targets. They remain valid targets when they use schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, and residential areas as bases for combat operations. This is pretty clear in international law.

Israel still must not target civilians, and must take reasonable measures to minimize civilian casualties of war. We’ve seen Israel, in at least some contexts, take quite extreme measures to warn civilians, help evacuate civilians, and carefully target munitions to minimize civilian death despite Hamas and PIJ using those civilians as human shields.

The raw numbers are still gruesome… unless you compare them to other instances of urban warfare, in which case the numbers are actually lower than many would expect. The civilian death ratio, as far as we’ve been able to estimate (since Hamas does not estimate), appears to be lower than usual.

Civilian deaths are tragic. It would obviously be much better if Hamas had not started this war, or if they would agree to the ceasefire Israel offered, or if they weren’t so committed to war in general. But they are. They frequently condemn even the concept of peace, and insist that they will repeat the October 7th attack as often as they can. There is no avenue to peace while they remain in power.

So the war will continue. And we will continue to hope that Israel does its best to minimize harm to civilians.

Warfare that is self-contained, distinguishes between combatant and non-combatant, does not cause damage that ends up being permanent, and doesn’t make metaphorical deals with the devil.

The Olmert proposal where Israel wanted to keep 10% of the West Bank (not that we know much about the proposal or why it failed, but from that point it’s a no-go)?

No, the actual Olmert proposal. It involved land swaps for about 6.3% of the West Bank (to help minimize the number of Israelis who need to be forced out of their homes), giving East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as the capitol…

Abbas didn’t feel like negotiating from that starting point. Because he either didn’t want peace, or didn’t think he could swing it politically (with a Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority). A not-one-inch even-with-land-swaps even-with-this even-with-that policy is not conducive to peace.

And what opportunity in 2005 they fucking blockaded the place as soon as they left.

No, the blockade started in 2007. You’re missing the two years where Gaza was totally free and Hamas used that freedom to ramp up rocket fire, kill their opponents in Fatah, and gain a majority in the PA.

How much land do you think Ukraine should cede for peace?

For a war Russia started? With no justification? None. Not even land swaps.

How much control should Russia have in Ukraine’s government in exchange for ending the occupation?

As much as it takes for Russian civillians to be safe, which is to say, again, none. Ukraine does not have a history of massacring Russian civilians, they haven’t repeatedly stated that they’d repeat attacks on Russian civilians ad infinitum after any hypothetical ceasefire.

Also, are you aware of Palestine’s proposal to respect the 1967 borders, which Israel rejected?

Which proposal?

Maybe if it was the 1940s this would be a bit more accurate, but at this point, we’re a couple generations removed from the original mass displacements. Most Israelis today were born there.

Like I said, the way towards progress lies with both sides finding a way to get over historical grievances of who started what and who’s to blame for this and that and instead accepting the fact that they’re both here now and need to find a way to exist with each other.

That’s essentially the reality of the situation, though. The land was populated by Palestinians before Europe and the rest of the Middle East NIMBY’d their remaining Jewish populations to Israel.

This is all kinds of wrong.

Zionism was a Jewish movement. Antisemitism was not NIMBYism, that’s a pretty horrible thing to say, it was persecution, pogroms, attacks, the holocaust, a constant stream of hate and oppression. Zionism was certainly not a movement of the Europeans and Middle Easterners who persecuted us. It was our movement. Zionism was not just an escape, but also a long held dream of the Jewish people that coalesced as it became plausible in late Ottoman policy. It was finally possible for Jews to buy land in, and immigrate to, Israel, so many of us did.

We are not foreign to Israel. It is our indigenous homeland. As the rest of the world rejected us, we no longer felt safe as strangers in strange lands. We considered the possibility of having our own nation on borrowed land from the Russians, or from the Germans, or in Alaska. We didn’t care for those ideas because of how stupid they were. We wanted a homeland in our homeland. If you don’t understand Jewish indigeneity in Judea, maybe you’re not ready to talk about complex topics.

As for the Palestinian ties to the land—Palestinian nationalism barely existed before Jewish people started returning to Israel. Arabs in the various Ottoman Sanjaks or whatever division there was at the time were mostly traveling merchants or pilgrims; there was, of course, a small permanent population, which included Jews (always, despite various efforts to remove them or ban them), Christians, and Muslims, but that population expanded dramatically starting in the mid-late 1800s on all fronts. The Arabs then either continued to call themselves Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians (“Jordan” and “Palestine” were part of the same colony, I hope you know), or they subscribed to some conception of pan-Arabism. The word “Palestinian,” to the extent was used at all before the ~1960s, was used largely to refer to whoever happened to be in Palestine (like “New Yorker,” not referring to a race of some kind), or specifically, in Europe, to refer to Jews. Palestinian nationalism largely gained traction in the 1960s as a political movement, and even then, many leaders were committed to pan-Arabism but treated Palestinian identity as a useful political fiction; Zuhair Moshen in particular, as a leader of the PLO, pushed these ideas, and in much of the politics between the West Bank and Jordan through that period. Of course, since the 1940s, Palestinian identity has taken on new meanings, but many of these meanings are young, and the vast majority of these peoples’ ties to the land start between the 1800s and 1948—a beat before similarly-shaped spikes in the Jewish return.

Palestinian nationalism is now used in other Arab countries to keep Palestinian Arabs oppressed; Jordan revoked their Jordanian citizenship, Lebanon refuses to grant them basic rights, UNRWA refuses to resettle them across multiple generations.