Schools with rockets and other weapons in them? I call it the predictable reaction of a nation state that has its population come under unguided missile barrages.

If Israel were the United States and Gaza was Tijuana, Tijuana would be a parking lot right now.

Palestine doesn’t have a “leader”. It’s “leadership” is made up of shifting coalitions of militant groups, with varying degrees of fundamentalism and political objectives of varying maximalism. Because of this, Abbas’ opinion isn’t actually indicative of if the militant groups that constitute the Palestinian leadership want themselves.

So, we have to turn to actions, because they speak louder than words. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, which is the only data point we have with which to predict what would happen if Israel withdrew from the West Bank as well.

What ended up happening? Israel got rocket attacks and cross border raids in response, precisely because the militant groups that truly constitute the Palestinian leadership don’t actually share Abbas’ surface-level statement that the 1967 borders are legitimate. Abbas probably doesn’t even believe it himself.

The truth is that Israel could withdraw to the 1967 or even the 1948 borders and the vast majority of Palestinian militants would only view it as “partial success”.

That user believes all of Israel is “occupied land” that must be “liberated”, and that all Israelis are “colonizers”. In other words, that user does not view them as civilians, but as legitimate targets.

Palestinian militants view all of Israel as “the occupation”. They believe all Israeli land is “occupied territory” that must be “liberated”. Do you understand this and not care, or do you not understand that their goal is not merely the “liberation” of the West Bank, but the destruction of Israel itself?

>it’s all stolen land

Aside from this being both a falsification of geopolitical history and an abject denial of Jewish history & identity, as well as a tacit endorsement of ethnic cleansing, it is a completely politically insolvent sentiment today as well.

There are no concessions that Israel can offer people like you, aside from its own destruction, that will be satisfactory. So, why would Israel listen to people like you when you demand a withdrawal from the West Bank? It isn’t like you’d actually be satisfied if they did that; you want them to cease to exist.

This is just one reason why there is no benefit to listening to or paying even the slightest lip service to zero-sum sentiments like yours.

>Occupied peoples have a moral obligation to fight against their occupiers.

The problem here is that Palestinian fundamentalist militants are not just fighting to end the occupation of the West Bank - they are fighting to end Israel as a state, because they believe de jure Israeli territory is just as much "occupied land" as the West Bank is.

>The only way for the violence to end in Palestine is for Israel to stop causing it. That is the objective truth.

The objective truth is that Israel could withdraw to the 1967 or even the 1948 borders, and Palestinian militants would only consider it a "partial success", because they view all of Israel as "occupied territory" that needs to be "liberated". There is no evidence that the violence would stop if Israel withdrew from the West Bank - why? Because when the Israelis withdrew from Gaza, the violence did not stop, and only increased. This is the only data point that we, and the Israelis, have with which to reasonably predict what would happen if they end the occupation of the West Bank. No state in existence can reasonably expected to undertake an action like that, which it believes will place potentially tens of thousands of its civilians at risk.

There aren't really any concessions that Israel can offer to these militant groups, besides its own destruction, that will satisfy them. This is a serious problem and a major obstacle to peace.

How else do you propose that the identity of the dead are obtained? If we can't trust what the IDF says, because they want to maximize the number of militants killed, and we can't trust Palestinian fundamentalists, because they also want to maximize the number of "martyrs" killed, then we're at an informational bottleneck here. However, I don't think the solution in the face of an over-abundance of caution on identifying the dead is just to revert to calling every single person killed in the raid a "civilian" - that is arguably more disingenuous than going off of potentially false numbers from either side.

Unfortunately, this is only a partial answer. Antisemitic violence in the region predates Israel's establishment by decades, and would still exist even if Israel did not. Assuming that fundamentalist Palestinian militancy is merely/solely a result of their territorial losses on the battlefield in the past, and/or only a function of Israeli policy since the 1960s, is historically disingenuous to the extreme. It severely detracts from the agency of Palestinian fundamentalist militants, reducing them to a one-dimensional, reactionary force, and ignores the much greater complexity and maximalist aims of their driving ideology.

Ok here. From 28 minutes ago as of 10:16am PST.

"Various Palestinian militant groups claimed six of the dead — including the three from Lion’s Den targeted in the raid — as members."

https://apnews.com/article/politics-nablus-israel-west-bank-b29ffacdfefb473aae06542b01e0fded

It is a tragedy that others, including two old men, were killed as well. But let's not pretend like this was some random, unprovoked attack on unsuspecting, undeserving Palestinian civilians.

You don’t have to rely on any assumptions or guesswork, PIJ and Lion’s Den literally claimed them as members.

I assume this is the part where the goalposts move, and you say “well yea ok they were militants… but they’re freedom fighters!!11!!!”

Thanks for calling that out. It's always the same story. "I got banned for antisemitism for calling the Israeli government bad!" Then you go to the comment they got banned for, and 90% of the time its them arguing that Israel is an illegitimate state, that it should cease to exist, that Jews are "illegal immigrants" that "stole" the entire country from Arabs, complaining that Israel is evidence that "Jews didn't learn their lesson from the Nazis", and other BS that straight up actually is antisemitic.

“When I die, I want my body to get strapped to a rocket and shot into space”

“Which direction?”

“Yes”

Side quest unlocked