As someone who has been following world politics since young age and really would love to see this seemingly everlasting conflict resolved and human suffering on all sides reduced, my prefered solution would be one where the Palestinians are alive, free and lost all incentives to carry out terrorist attacks so that both sides in this conflict can finally attempt to embrace what they have in common instead of fighting each other.

My worry is that this is not something a big part of Israel even wants to attempt — or maybe they lost the faith that this could ever be possible — so they want the Palestinians to just be gone.

The problem with wanting a group of people to "just be gone" is that there is no ethical, no clean way of doing it and the act of even attempting it would produce new problems of unspeakable proportions.

If you talk about the small things, the terrorist attacks that didn't make it to wikipedia, I am sure your Palestinian counterpart would talk about similar things from their daily lives that make living hell for them or collective punishment they received just for being part of a certain ethnic group. You might mention a relative that got killed in a terrorist attack, they might mention a relative that got killed in a raid that happened before or after.

And both of you are of course right and anybody not from the region (like me) would have a hard time to make something of that competition of suffering. But I don't think that this competition is going to solve anything and winning it isn't worth it.

Without having people on both sides rising above and extending an olive branch this won't end well. Granted, it still might end, but I don't feel well to see the people who had to experience the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust to solve their problems in a way that results in a group of other people "being gone". This would remain a stain on Israel forever, just like the Holocaust should remain a stain on Austria and Germany forever.

Which sides wants the other "gone" ? If the Gazans had the power to do it I have no doubt they would kill hundreds of thousands of Israelis. I don't understand how you can even deny it. The only thing stopping them, for now, is lack of ability.

From the river to the sea... is not just another lifestyle position. I would argue that you might not have followed the conflict too closely.

Gaza did get more autonomy. They even had the chance to found their own country. They responded with war and I don't think there can be an alternative "history" to that.

you are kind wrong. majority of population realists. everybody knows that palestinians don't go anywhere. there are no majority opinion in favor of "genociding" palestinians. majority of population was excited to hear news about potential normalization with saudia and that this process may also force some kind of normalization of palestinian authority. i don't even know what you mean by "group of other people been gone", because it's most definitely not mainstream in israel. and not near mainstream. it's fringe position in israeli society

people are tiered in israel. people want for all this to be over. people want normalization with pa. with lebanon. not sure about syria though.

>I am sure your Palestinian counterpart would talk about similar things from their daily lives that make living hell for them or collective punishment they received just for being part of a certain ethnic group

everything that happens anywhere tend to be widely publicized. "collective punishment" is a good way to take very complicated situation that developed over last 100 years and reduce is to two words. kudos

and my points wasn't about competition of suffering. my point was that if you don't live there you don't really get to understand where people on both sides stand and what exactly happens because press doesn't really cover it to depth

I have no doubt about that. If you read my post I did not use the word majority anywhere. I used "a big part". Now the obvious question is: how big is "big" from the perspective of such a conflict? I don't think it needs many hardliners on both sides to keep the thing going indefinitely. It then just needs many who shrug and let them do it.

> collective punishment" is a good way to take very complicated situation that developed over last 100 years and reduce is to two words. kudos

Discussing a topic always entails reducing things into a shorter, abstract form, otherwise you cannot discuss them at all. We make maps of the landscape in order to orient, carrying around the landscape in 1:1 turned out to be impractical.

So you can (and should) reason against my choice of abstraction and tell me why you think it is a poor choice that doesn't describe the reality on the ground (and I might learn something from your answer). But demanding that I can't use abstraction at all and demanding the impossible is less productive.

I chose the abstraction of "collective punishment" very carefully. The Gaza strip is a densely populated area with a big fraction of the population being kids below a age where they could even understand what is going on. Those kids have been born into that conflict and they did nothing wrong — just like Israeli kids that got slaughtered by Hamas did nothing wrong.

Collective punishments like the terrorist attacks of Hamas or Israel turning off the water and electricity for the Gaza strip or bombing their homes (be it as collateral or on purpose) is a good way to create the next wave of violence and the next generation of terrorists.

I get that the reality on the ground is important. But the reality on the ground was also what perpetuated the Thirty Years' War — which is why I proposed taking a step back and out of it is the only way to put a stop to it. The complexities violent conflicts produce are the reason why it is hard to end them. Historically without a rule of law you could have cycles of revenge and counter-revenge going on for centuries. But what happens if we are not talking about two enemy clans, but a state and a people? If you ask me, the state has to step up and attempt the impossible: Protecting the rule of law and human rights while still protecting it's people from the violence of asymmetric warfare.

I have enough friends that live in the area (mostly on the Israeli side tho) to have an idea what this conflict can entail on a personal level, but that doesn't mean one cannot have a more systemic look at things.

this awkward moment when /r/worldnews has a more nuanced discussion using historical facts and not newspaper clippings.

idf speaker btw just said that there is a team analyzing uploaded videos using face recognition software (this is topical, right ?) in order to find all those who participated and to punish them. lets add extrajudicial killings (did I name it right ?) to list of things that complicate this conflict.