I’ll even go further and say that Israel’s security requires a Palestinian state to exist. Because at the end of the day, unless Israel wants to actually do the things that ignirant college kids insist it is doing, we will need to make peace with the Palestinians, and to do that you need someone who is actually in charge there, and you need people who have a path to a prosperous life so they have reason to buy into the social system, etc. Long story short, Palestine needs to be a stable and prosperous place for Palestinians even by the most cynical and practical assessment from the Israeli perspective, because that’s the only way to secure a lasting peace.
If someone started chanting that “Israel must be safe from the Mountain to the Reef” I highly doubt that you would conclude that clearly, he is speaking of a prosperous and safe two state solution. So this situation isn’t what the protestors are talking about.
I consider any enemy of a two state solution to be an enemy of peace.
What do you mean, “don’t see a problem”? How is it possibly not a problem that Israelis and Palestinians want to live on the same land, to which they can both claim ancestral rights? Is there anybody at all who doesn’t recognize that that is the problem, fundamentally?
But the problem cannot be validly resolved by insisting on the Israelis’ claims and denying and ignoring the Palestinians’. Palestinians have just as much right to self-determination and sovereignty as Israelis do.
If both sides can accept sovereignty over parts of their ancestral homeland, but not the whole thing, then we can have two prosperous countries living in peace. (And a hundred years from now these countries may be so closely aligned economically and socially that people from both sides have no issues freely living in the other nation’s borders, much like in the EU - the most realistic path I see to a “right of return”).
Or we can continue down the path of revanchism that we started down on Nov 30, 1947 when the UN partition plan was rejected by (one of) the sides.
I can tell you which side calls for “River to the Sea” are on, that’s for sure.
You can’t have two sovereign nations on the same land. If you want to discuss a two-state solution, with the Palestinian state being behind the Green Line, we have something to talk about. But if there’s just going to be one state here, it’s going to be Israel.
Let’s say, hypothetically, Israel gave them some of the land they supposedly want. I am fully confident that, afterwards, their goal would be… the destruction of Israel.
Based on their words and action over the past many decades, the destruction of Israel seems to be their one, true, goal, regardless of anything else.
And yet he already has stated changes to his initial stated policy. Picking out individual statements only further muddies the picture. There is so much of the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant here. It’s easy to look at this issue from just one aspect and ignore everything else about it.
That’s not what you said. I agree the support for Hamas is greater than some describe. As I stated above there’s going to be hardcore support and a gradation of the level across the wider population. Gazans have long felt apart from the West Bank. So there’s no question they’d prefer their own government* and they have a long antipathy to Israel and Hamas represents them in that sense. That doesn’t mean they’d choose the current Hamas leadership if they had anything like a choice.
*One reason a two-state solution is nonsense is there are 3 states fighting over who has dibs on the land.
The obvious answer is that Israel is much more military powerful than Hamas. If Israel wanted to impose a one state solution by force of arms, there’s nothing to stop them, even without nukes. Hamas has no such option.