Okay, Israel and Palestine

I've been circumspect about this, because people hear what they want to hear or think they're hearing about it, instead of what people actually say; and they believe what they want to believe. Furthermore, certain truths may not be spoken. But Fintan O'Toole has said what needs to be said (registration required, though I have a subscription) succinctly and clearly enough that I'll take his essay as guidance. First, I'll quote his setup:

If war is supposed to be the continuation of politics by other means, Israel’s assault on Gaza seems to be the continuation by other means of the absence of politics. It does not seem that Israel understands what its endgame is. Without a clear sense of an ending, there can be no answer to the most crucial moral and strategic question: When is enough enough? Even in the crudely mathematical logic of vengeance, the blood price for Hamas’s appalling atrocities of October 7 has long since been paid. The body count—if that is to be the measure of retribution—has mounted far beyond the level required for an equality of suffering. Yet it appears to have no visible ceiling. What factor must Jewish deaths be multiplied by? When, as W.B. Yeats asked in a different conflict, may it suffice?

 

The truth is that successive Israeli governments have tolerated Hamas rule in Gaza precisely because  the organization is implacably opposed to the existence of Israel and therefore, as long as it remained in power, peacemaking with the Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank was impossible, and Israel does not want a peace agreement. It wants to gradually squeeze the Palestinians out of the West Bank and seize the territory. As O'Toole summarizes:

A review of Israel’s Gaza wars between 2009 and 2014, commissioned by the US military from the RAND Corporation and published in 2017, points out that this was warfare specifically designed not to defeat the enemy:

Israel never strived for a decisive victory in Gaza. While it could militarily defeat Hamas, Israel could not overthrow Hamas without risking the possibility that a more radical organization would govern Gaza. Nor did Israel want to be responsible for governing Gaza in a postconflict power vacuum.  

Implicit in this policy of repeatedly attacking a regime with overwhelming firepower while not wanting victory over it was the impossibility of an endgame. There would be no peace but also no decisive war. Even if thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis died in these intermittent eruptions of extreme violence, their purpose was to maintain this brutality at what RAND calls a “manageable” level. . . .

Bombs and tanks do not answer questions. Who is to govern Gaza if not Hamas or Israel itself? Does Israel really think that, without the creation of a Palestinian state, somebody else—either an international consortium or a Palestinian puppet regime—will sail into a blood-soaked hellscape of rubble and dust, inhabited by traumatized survivors, and take responsibility for rebuilding, policing, and governing it? How is Israel going to make the kind of peace with its immediate neighbors without which the security of its citizens cannot be rebuilt?

Well yes. There you have it. The goal is not peace and security, but conquest. Meir Kahane said it in a NYT op ed in 1983, titled "For a Jewish State, Annex and Expel." 

 

More and more we hear from those who in truth are hardly friends of Israel or Jewishness the argument that, for Israel's own sake, it must rid itself of the ''occupied'' lands. Why? For the pragmatic reason that holding them involves adding more than a million Arabs to Israel's population. How, such liberals ask, can Israel keep its Jewish character if it incorporates all these non-Jews? It is for Israel's sake, then, and in the name of its ''Jewishness,'' that these liberals urge Israel to give up the lands of 1967. . . .

The very idea of a ''democratic Jewish state'' is nonsense. A state can be permanently defined as Jewish or as democratic, but never both. Already, the Galilee has a majority of non-Jews - a majority of Arabs. Acre is more than a third Arab; Ramle and Lydda 25 percent; Jerusalem, rapidly approaching 30 percent. Divesting ourselves of the liberated lands of 1967 only postpones the inevitable dilemma between democracy and Jewishness. For me, the choice is easy. I have no desire to continue living as a minority at the sufferance of a majority - a situation that inevitably leads to Inquisitions, pogroms and Auschwitzes. I have not the slightest guilt about choosing a Jewish state - and life -over the democratic possibility of losing that state. Physical survival and my commitment to building a center of Judaism lead me easily to that choice - even at the expense of Western democracy. The answer is not to give up the lands of 1967 or those of 1947. For me, the moral answer lies in annexation of all the lands and the completion of an exchange of populations begun in 1948, when more than 700,000 Jews fled Arab lands. For the sake of survival -and to assure that the Galilee does not become another Northern Ireland -let us carry out the second stage: The removal of the Arabs in the Land of Israel to their own Arab lands.

This has been Netanyahu's goal all along. You may even agree, but let's be clear what we're talking about.