Do you think that if Hamas and all the other militant/terrorist organizations in Gaza surrendered all of their weapons to Israel tomorrow, conditions would improve for Palestinians? Do you think Israel would accept mass Palestinian (Arab) immigration? Do you think Israel would release its control of Palestine's borders? Do you think Israel would stop evicting Arabs and establishing Jewish colonies in Palestine?
If you think all of these things, then you should look at the history of occupied territories much more closely.
> I wonder what the UK or US would do if the kids in London and NY would need to run to shelters a few times a week because of missile attacks. I'm sure they would seek to proportionally kill just as many terrorists right?
The US and UK are farthest from my mind in terms of potential models of good behavior in such situations. They have been some of the worse offenders in history in terms of unequal retaliation - the US's ongoing twenty-year plus war in the Middle East as punishment for 9/11 being one of the prime examples of unacceptable behavior in recent memory.
> It's not as if Israel can just decide to absorb this and do nothing, what country would do nothing in such a state?
Again, Israel is the original aggressor here. This fact is of utmost importance - Hamas was born in response to Israeli aggression, not the other way around. Israel could have chosen not to occupy the Gaza strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem in 1967. Even once they chose to occupy these territories, they could have chosen to integrate them as parts of Israel, and offer citizenship to their occupants - but of course, this would have meant that Israel was no longer a Jewish state, having a majority Arab population, which was deemed (and is still deemed) unacceptable.
Would the world be a better place had the Palestinians chosen to sacrifice their own interests and accepted to live as sub-humans under Israeli military rule, without retaliating against Israelis (remember, this was the state of Gaza and the other Palestinian territories between 1967 and 1994)? Yes, undoubtedly. Is it fair and reasonable to ask such a thing of an entire people? I certainly don't believe so.
> Do you think that if Hamas and all the other militant/terrorist organizations in Gaza surrendered all of their weapons to Israel tomorrow, conditions would improve for Palestinians?
Yes, absolutely. Conditions have been much much better before Hamas came to power. In fact Israelis and Gazans used to visit each other freely in the 80s and lots of Gazans worked in Israel.
> Do you think Israel would accept mass Palestinian (Arab) immigration?
No, I don't. That's the crux of the matter and also deals with your comment about who the "main aggressor" is. Israel wants to remain a Jewish country, that means settle the descendants of Palestinian refugees in their current countries. Given what Jews have been through it should be clear why Jews feel like they need a country of their own. Given the fact that Palestinians don't really want to live in a binational state with Jews, or in a democracy, and all the bad blood between the two peoples, it should be clear why allowing uncontrolled immigration to Israel is not a solution but a creation of a new problem (probably a new wave of jewish refugees)
> Yes, absolutely. Conditions have been much much better before Hamas came to power. In fact Israelis and Gazans used to visit each other freely in the 80s and lots of Gazans worked in Israel.
Those are some spectacular rose tinted goggles. Gaza was a refugee camp entirely under Israeli control, and Palestinians were almost entirely doing unskilled labor in Israel. Israel decided where and if new housing could be built in Gaza, new farms, anything. They instituted a police state in Gaza, with curfews, collective punishment and other methods. People in Gaza were kept poor to work unwanted jobs for Israel. The current situation of people in Gaza is significantly better than it was then. Hamas and the PLO appeared because of the poor situation in Gaza, and Israel's iron fist, not out of the evilness of Palestinians.
> That's the crux of the matter and also deals with your comment about who the "main aggressor" is. Israel wants to remain a Jewish country, that means settle the descendants of Palestinian refugees in their current countries.
There are two problems with this line of thinking. One is, the land of Palestine is simply not a majority Jewish area. It had been a majority Arab area for hundreds of years before 1949. It is today a 50/50 Arab/Jewish area (approximately). But Israel wants to be a Jewish ethno-state, Arab Palestinians be damned. The two-state (or three-state) solution would already be a massive compromise for the Arab population, given the relative land-mass and resources vs population of the potential Palestine (or Gaza and West Bank) compared to Israel. But, Israel is not even content with that.
Your assertion that Palestinians don't want to live in a democracy is bizarre, given that they already live in one. Whether they want to live in a 50/50 Jewish/Arab Israel is irrelevant, as that is not an option Israel will ever contemplate, at least in the current framework.
The only option that remains, and what seems most likely to happen, is that Israel will continue to demoralize, kill, and harass the people of Gaza and the West Bank until such a time as the remaining Arab population will be small enough compared to the Jewish population of Israel, and then it will annex these territories into a single Israeli state with a minority (<20% ?) Arab population enjoying full rights. I don't honestly see any other end to this conflict that Israel would accept.
> Given what Jews have been through it should be clear why Jews feel like they need a country of their own.
This is partly understandable, partly disingenuous. While there are obvious reasons after the horrors of the Holocaust that the Jewish survivors would want to have a country of their own, there is no non-religious reason this country should have been in Palestine. A chunk of the defeated Germany, for example, would have been a much more natural and easier to create space. The region of Palestine was already inhabited in the 1940s, and the people living there had no fault or implication in the horrors of the Holocaust. But, it was impossible to create a Jewish majority state there without displacing hundreds of thousands of Arabs.
Nevertheless, history is what it is. Dissolving the state of Israel today would be at least as unjust as creating it was in the first place, and would lead to even more misery - I would not advocate for that in the slightest. Dismantling the idea of a Jewish ethno-state would be much more just, but that is a complete fantasy at this point, akin to saying that North Korea should just become a democracy. Still, Israel can't claim it's not an apartheid state while stoking a conflict on the sole reason of not wanting a significant amount of Arabs to live on its territory with full rights.
> The only option that remains, and what seems most likely to happen, is that Israel will continue to demoralize, kill, and harass the people of Gaza and the West Bank until such a time as the remaining Arab population will be small enough compared to the Jewish population of Israel, and then it will annex these territories into a single Israeli state with a minority (<20% ?) Arab population enjoying full rights. I don't honestly see any other end to this conflict that Israel would accept.
Many options remain: peace, Palestinian refugees settled where they're living in now, an Iranian nuclear attack on TLV and flight of all the Jews from there, who knows. The area is unpredictable, I'm not gonna try to predict anything.
> peace, Palestinian refugees settled where they're living in now
These two are dependent on one another, and every evidence so far suggests that the Gaza strip and West Bank simply aren't big enough and don't have enough resources (water and arable land especially) to sustain their population. This could work with massive resource commitments from Israel, Jordan and Egypt, but that doesn't seem to me like a realistic stable possibility for the long term.
> While there are obvious reasons after the horrors of the Holocaust that the Jewish survivors would want to have a country of their own,
Actually Zionism started about 50 years before the holocaust because of massacres of Jews in East Europe in the Dreyfus trial which was the last straw. Turns out Zionism was right, couldn't be more right.
> A chunk of the defeated Germany, for example, would have been a much more natural and easier to create space
No one offered, and as I say above Jews needed a place well before the holocaust. Also you're talking as if there's some just policeman who runs the world and thinks of "just" and practical solutions for everyone. There isn't any. Jews found out the hard way what could happen to them, no one offered them jack s**. Almost all countries restricted Jewish immigration before and during the holocaust.
The Palestinian predicament can be solved with fair compensation to the refugees and resettlement, a Palestinian state beside Israel in the 67 border and an end to hostilities. But they have to give up the will to destroy Israel and they can't do that it seems to me.
> Also you're talking as if there's some just policeman who runs the world and thinks of "just" and practical solutions for everyone. There isn't any. Jews found out the hard way what could happen to them, no one offered them jack s*.
The partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state was designed by the UN and the British Empire, which retreated from the territory and let the dice fall where they may. Just another in the long series of insane borders the British Empire traced all over the Middle East, the cause of so much bloodshed over the years.
Of course, this wouldn't have happened if the Zionist movement hadn't lobbied for it, so I do agree with you that it was ultimately every man for himself. But had they petitioned for a piece of Germany, and had the European and American and Russian powers who re-drew the world been more wise, this entire situation could have been avoided. Alas, history can't be re-written, and who knows what other problems would have occurred.
If you think all of these things, then you should look at the history of occupied territories much more closely.
> I wonder what the UK or US would do if the kids in London and NY would need to run to shelters a few times a week because of missile attacks. I'm sure they would seek to proportionally kill just as many terrorists right?
The US and UK are farthest from my mind in terms of potential models of good behavior in such situations. They have been some of the worse offenders in history in terms of unequal retaliation - the US's ongoing twenty-year plus war in the Middle East as punishment for 9/11 being one of the prime examples of unacceptable behavior in recent memory.
> It's not as if Israel can just decide to absorb this and do nothing, what country would do nothing in such a state?
Again, Israel is the original aggressor here. This fact is of utmost importance - Hamas was born in response to Israeli aggression, not the other way around. Israel could have chosen not to occupy the Gaza strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem in 1967. Even once they chose to occupy these territories, they could have chosen to integrate them as parts of Israel, and offer citizenship to their occupants - but of course, this would have meant that Israel was no longer a Jewish state, having a majority Arab population, which was deemed (and is still deemed) unacceptable.
Would the world be a better place had the Palestinians chosen to sacrifice their own interests and accepted to live as sub-humans under Israeli military rule, without retaliating against Israelis (remember, this was the state of Gaza and the other Palestinian territories between 1967 and 1994)? Yes, undoubtedly. Is it fair and reasonable to ask such a thing of an entire people? I certainly don't believe so.