Meanwhile on the International front....

Haaretz has been criticizing him throughout.

Netanyahu wrought carnage on Israel. He should have resigned already

 

Israelis were turning out in the hundreds of thousands to protest Bibi before this attack happened.

 

October 7 demonstrates pretty clearly it hasn't been a deterrent.

It's another episode in the long-running cycle of attack and counterattack.

Maybe we need to look at the problem differently. Maybe we're trying to solve the wrong problem.

Maybe a country of 7 million people can't safely maintain an internal refugee population of 2.5 million people.

 

There have been periods of relative peace. Is that because everybody just decided to play nice or is it because the previous deterrent worked for a while?

Again, there isn't a solution that both sides are going to accept because they want the same parcel of land. Maybe the general population in Gaza would accept something like you proposed above, but Hamas won't, so what is the point of Israel making the offer? It will only embolden the terrorists.

The deterrent option isn't a permanent solution. It isn't a good solution. In their minds, it is the better of a menu of bad options. I haven't seen any evidence of any of the other options being better.

 

Before sports talk radio, I used to always but the Post on Fridays because Joel Sherman had a column in which readers would submit (by mail) proposed trades and he would analyze them - Dan Pasqua and Brian Fisher for Pedro Guerrero type of fan-fiction.
This may well be a lovely solution, and maybe the best possible option; you're a smart guy. What you call short term is far from a realistic immediate plan for Israel as it depends on many other parties to sign on when it's almost certain that they wouldn't. So we're back to the drawing board. Of all the crappy choices that Israel (and its temporary unity government that includes opponents who hate Bibi more than any of you), which one is least crappy?

 

And you too never fail to meet my expectations.
You can criticize whoever you want, but when you do it the way that you are doing it you come off as the sports talk radio caller calling for the managers job because he left the starter in too long while acknowledging that everyone in the bullpen was worse.

 

If Israel said today, "We've exacted our revenge. There has been enough suffering and bloodshed. We are standing down," does anyone think Hamas would stop shooting rockets in that direction? Would they immediately release their hostages and commit to a peaceful co-existence with Israel?

Hamas committed a racially-motivated mass murder on a massive scale, the likes of which we have not seen outside of even larger coordinated ethnic cleansing campaigns like the Holocaust or Rwanda. They burned people alive. They murdered babies and chopped off every appendage imaginable. They've taken and murdered hostages — of many nationalities and religions, not just Israelis and Jews; some Americans are among them — and are using them as collateral to continue their own genocidal campaign. They are manipulating the civilized world's sense of common decency to twist all of this savagery into justification. Sadly, and horrifyingly, there are those in the West who are sympathetic to it and refuse to acknowledge that everything Hamas has done goes against all of the ideals they supposedly stand for.

Hamas is operating at a level of evil and villainy that the world cannot abide and it certainly cannot negotiate with, even if it wanted to. There is every reason to believe that doing so will only embolden them to greater acts of murder and depravity. It has reached a point where there is little choice but to eliminate that threat, or else we choose to live in a world where it thrives.

 

Agreed. I do think some people are misrepresenting support for innocent Palestinians as support for Hamas, but way too many people have been suckered into thinking the Israelis are the villains here and that all they have to do is play nice and everything will settle down. It won't. I am absolutely certain that Israel standing down right now would only embolden Hamas to commit more heinous acts.

 

Eliminate it how?

 

OK. Granted.

As I said upthread, I'll stipulate every villainy and every horror.

Now what?

 

I certainly don't have any great solution to decades and centuries of Middle East violence, but I believe this: When a political group, even if it wins the popular vote in an election, has a goal of eradicating a country and all the people in it, somebody needs to stand up to it. That's true in Europe, in the Middle East and it's true here.

 

Palestinians whose grandfathers and great grandfathers lived on annexed land have a legit beef. Part of why they resist moving somewhere else is the well founded fear that if they do Israel will not let them come back.