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[sebastian_dangerfield]

You forgot to say that he created a permanent impasse by dying and leaving no one for Israel to negotiate with.

Arafat created a permanent impasse by dragging Barak and Clinton thru a peace process that was 90% done, only to back peddle at the last second and demand what he knew would blow up the deal - right of return. He conveyed to Israel and the world that the PLO was not and would not negotiate in good faith for realistic two state solutions.

What's the principle that explains why Jews should have a right of return to a country that did not exist until 1948 and where their ancestors may never have lived, while Palestinians should not have a right of return to the country where they did live? I am interested in your answer both to the normative question of principle, and also in your answer to the pragmatic, positive question of how there could ever be a durable peace if the fundamental bargain is so unfair to Palestinians.

There isn't one. You know my view of religion, so it won't surprise you to hear that any claim to the land based on that is void in my opinion. So then we're left with the law of power. The Israelis did live in the area historically and received and held the land for the last eight decades. Not unlike the Native Americans here, who will never get back that which was lost, nor will the Palestinians. Time marches on and the realpolitik has been for a long time (indeed, embraced by Egypt, Jordan, and soon, Saudi Arabia) that Israel is there to stay, as a Jewish state.

You can argue the Brits fucked up the boundaries, the state should have been elsewhere, whatever. It is what it is. It's there, and most of the Palestinians who lost land are long dead, and their families could have received equivalent land or money under various different deals, but have refused.

And finally, perhaps most importantly, what did those Palestinians lose? Desert. They'd not done anything with it and it wasn't worth anything. The Israelis made the state of Israel into what it is today, because they installed a liberal democracy. Would the Palestinians have done so? No.

Yeah, it's unfair, but any more unfair than giving generations long removed from Israel a right to return to it and reclaim something that's been improved 100X only by the hard work of the current residents?

I totally agree with you that it's a really messy situation. I don't like the law of power ruling any more than anyone else, but if you look around this country, are things much different? We're never giving reparations to descendants of slaves or land back to indigenous peoples because it's just not realistic, and too much time has elapsed for the concept to have any validity. Israel, Northern Ireland... these places are the same.

You can't give the Palestinians back the land, so that means the only thing you can give them is money. How? I don't know.

I am interested in your answer both to the normative question of principle, and also in your answer to the pragmatic, positive question of how there could ever be a durable peace if the fundamental bargain is so unfair to Palestinians. At the risk of stating the obvious, is it not basically this imbalance, and Israel's refusal to negotiate about it, that prompts young Palestinian men to join Hamas and slaughter innocent civilians?

Yes. I agree. But I also think it's a lack of a future that drives them into Hamas. Rather than disengage, Israel should have subsidized more of the industry that was growing north of Gaza and given aid to the area itself. The more Gazans worked with Israelis and made decent wages, the more money Gazans had, the more its people would develop a sustainable economy as opposed to a welfare state dependent on Iranian money.

We fucked that up. The Israelis fucked that up. We should have tried to buy off/improve these people (those two are not mutually exclusive). Instead, Sharon cut it off, and Netanyahu encourage Hamas for his own political gain.

We piss away so many billions on bullshit around the world. Why we haven't thrown a few billion at placating/improving the Palestinians baffles me.

You are the one who finds it impossible to discuss these issues without comparing the relative "badness" or culpability of each side. I keep saying I'm not interested in that. Not sure why you don't get it.

I've said why. I think Hamas' recent attack is depravity. They've not been depraved before.

Rhetorically, the practical effect of your insistence that we only talk about Hamas's change in tactics, and about how Hamas is worse than Israel, is that Israel gets a pass for whatever it does, because Hamas is worse, we completely ignore what Israel has done to make things worse than they could be, we ignore the many Palestinians who aren't in Hamas, and we get no closer to any kind of solution. Bombing and invading Gaza to try to eliminate Hamas is not a solution, much as invading Iraq because of 9/11 got us ISIS.

We can talk about both, as we are here. But when something so grotesque happens that the perpetrator deserves to be globally condemned in the harshest possible terms, noting in immediate response that the victim isn't exactly blameless is a counterproductive diversion.

An imperfect analogy is the George Floyd thing. In the fallout of that a number of stories cited the fact that he had a long criminal record, that he came from a poor background, that police were ill trained, etc. All these things were true. But IMO they all detracted from what needed to be assessed in a vacuum - the cold blooded killing of the man. That first had to be processed. And I think it had to be seen for nothing more than the brutality it was. Because it was so shocking. Among all the other takeaways that would follow, this had to be front and center, and stand alone: A guy was choked to death under a police boot on camera while three other officers watched and did nothing.

I still cannot figure out how that horrific event occurred. And similarly, I still cannot figure out how Hamas soldiers raped mothers in front of their families and shot them.

An event of depravity is always part of a bigger book. But needs its own chapter, devoted to nothing else but it.