So what is Israel supposed to do? Just let thousands of their citizens be slaughtered every few months from Hamas raids?
I'm not going to get into the ways in which those premises are misleading, because it frankly doesnt matter.
"Terrorism" is Public Relations with violence. Hamas wants and needs the support of the Palestiniam people, and more than that, they want and need the sympathy of people abroad to provide political pressure for material support from sympathetic nations (read this more as: countries who would like to see the Israeli state destabilized; people sympathize, nations only care about position and power).
Military action in civilian locations are a terrible idea. The actual military targets just fade away into the populace. What you wind up doing is just killing and oppressing civilians...justifying every word that your opposition uses as recruitment.
Hamas gains recruitment when Israel oppresses Palestinians. This should be easy to imagine.
The solution therefore is to....
not oppress Palestinians. You literally cannot win a "war" against terrorism. Al Qaeda still exists. ISIS still exists. The Taliban still exists and may be stronger than before. We learned the lessons of neighborhood-fighting and anti-terrorism the hard way.
Remember all the "hearts and minds" stuff from Afghanistan? It was true, and the problem is that it's not an issue that the military could solve.
What Israel
should be doing is seeking reconciliation, not genocide. Palestinians have absolutely legitimate grievances against Israel, stemming all the way before the Israeli state was formed from their literal backyards. Stop the checkpoints. Stop the settlements (which are already in violation of multiple international agreements). Either recognize a Palestinian state according to the pre-1960s borders, or grant Palestinians full recognition and citizenship under Israeli law along with the "right of return." Severely punish Israeli citizens and military personnel who abuse and murder Palestinians. Investigate such actions in good faith. Stop indefinitely imprisoning Palestinians without charges.
No more bombings. Convince the Palestinian people to turn against Hamas themselves; if you treat others as friends, they will be friendly to you. If you murder their children in airstrikes and try to literally kill everyone through famine...the outcome should be obvious.
Stop being the bad guys in the view of the Palestinians.
If you have the power, you have the responsibility.
The Palestinian people have
no power. Both figuratively and mostly literally.
The Israelis have
all of the power. They take territory and murder and rape and imprison with impunity. They have a full modern military, nuclear weapons, the Iron Dome for defense against those rockets, and are under precisely
zero existential threat from Palestinians.
Occasionally Hamas gets some rockets through. Rarely they carry out a successful "real" attack like Oct 7. They cannot hurt Israel, the state. This doesnt make them good guys. It makes them oppressed people reacting with violence to stop the oppression and violence directed at their own people.
This isn't some underground terrorist organization within Gaza. This is the government of Gaza doing this.
Hamas is more complicated than that.
I'm going to make the assumption that you've watched Star Trek: Deeps Space Nine. Most of us are nerds here of the appropriate generations, I dont think it's an unsafe assumption.
Major Kira was a terrorist against Cardassian occupation. She did evil, very bad things. Murdered people, including their families. She did those things because she didnt have a lot of choices - the Cardassians were massacring her people and using them for slave labor and worse. Her own mother was a "comfort woman" for the Cardassian equivalent of Hitler, and while the specifics were complicated, she wasn't consenting.
The government of Bajor after the Cardassian withdrawal was made up in large part by resistance fighters. The terrorists. People who did evil things out of a desperate struggle against a larger-scale evil.
Just like in real life, the Bajoran and Cardassian legitimate animosity became generalized and deepened into racist hatred (the Cardassians were pretty racist from the start). You start to see violence that isn't just about resistance - it's about the
hate that decades of resistance and oppression have caused. Just like in real life, racism and racially-motivated violence are
increased by oppression.
Back to real life - if you want to see an example of what to actually do...look to Ireland.
The Troubles - Wikipedia
Decades of terrorism, fueled by religious, political, and nationalistic differences.
Just like with Israel and Palestine, "ceasefires" declared and broken.
Finally, the Good Friday Agreement.
Good Friday Agreement - Wikipedia
Not a military action to wipe out all paramilitary fighters. Not a mass bombing campaign. Not famine. Recognition, legitimacy, compromise, and peace.
It will still be generations before the bad blood from The Troubles is truly gone. They can do it, if they hold to the peace. That means that many will never find justice. Killers walk free. Old grudges and pain cant be erased, but they chose peace instead of acting on them, to give those wounds time to heal with new generations who won't have suffered that pain.
The leading political party in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein, was a terrorist organization. Thanks to the peace process, they're legitimate political leaders now. The vice-president of Sinn Fein is now the First minister of Northern Ireland.
We know what works. We know what doesnt work. We also know what happens when people are oppressed - even our fiction tells us truths about conflicts like these, even if we have to dress them up in silly prosthetic makeup and exaggerate characters.
What Israel is doing doesnt work. It just creates more loss. Their response to Oct 7, and the complicity of Israel's allies (especially the US), will in future decades be regarded as a source of great shame and a tragic, avoidable loss of human lives.
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"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995...
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"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."
1 Corinthians 15:26King James Version (KJV)
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