Few Good Options as Israel Weighs a Ground Assault on the Gaza Strip

I'm simply asking you to apply the same standards you apply to Palestine to Israel. You talk about an "impossible line" for Israel, how much more impossible is the situation for Palestinians? Israel has been demolishing homes, bombing entire apartment blocks and news stations, destroying crops, shooting women, children and unarmed reporters, raiding holy sites etc. they have been doing for decades exactly what Hamas has done but on an even larger scale with more money, support and military options and with far less humanitarian cost. And yet because it's done under the "respectable" flag of a nation state it's all excusable, all "bad apples".

These stories I linked, how many have you honestly even heard of from the past year? They're a blip on the radar. By contrast, every morning for the past week the attack in Israel has been the headline from NPR to Fox, all of them reporting western governments vowing support for Israel's campaign to cut off aid and supplies to Gazans and invade to wipe the "human animals" out. There's been a mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Israeli military personnel, Israeli airstrikes have killed 1,200 Gazans this week. That's NPR this morning, not "jihadist propaganda". You can't just handwave away the reality of profound suffering in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli regime because it's inconvenient when it comes to trying to justify Israel's actions.

Israel has ten times the power here, and yet you're willing to justify their brutality and apartheid as them having no choice, instead you act like Palestine has the power to resolve this while having no assumed right to retaliate themselves or even ability to move, negotiate or govern autonomously. It's been close to a decade since Israel refused to negotiate with even the legitimate Palestinian leadership itself. How are you suppose to believe Israel has a genuine interest in peace?

Netanyahu is the one who funded Hamas, so Israel is literally the one that created this situation. And now as they bomb the already-bombed-out rubble of Gaza, how do you see that changing the hearts and minds of Palestinians? Peace has never been the goal for Israel, it's about colonization and genocide. They have no interest in ever living alongside Palestinians (who have just as much a right to their homeland as anyone) or creating a unified state in which Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights. They're never going to draw any distinction between Hamas and the people of Palestine, these recent events have proved that beyond any doubt.

Do they have the power to pursue peace? Yep. Will they ever? Nope. Israel either needs to leave occupied territory and remove all their settlers from Gaza and Palestine, or agree to grant Palestinians a true seat at the table as equals, not as a subclass relegated to an open air prison, not as "Hamas collaboraters" and collateral damage. This is Israel's responsibility because, as we see, they have all the true territorial and military power here. Palestinians have none.

I'd challenge you to honestly ask yourself how would see this situation if the tables were turned, if it were a Hamas government oppressing a blockaded, starving Israeli population.