Oddbean

I appreciate your opinion. If you don't care to read the rest of this post, the summary is just this: "make peace not war." I don't accept the human shield argument. The IDF headquarters is next to a shopping mall in downtown Tel-Aviv. Are they using that as a human shield? Israel's enemies have known for a long time that human shielding doesn't work. It just happens to be that some military assets and civilian infrastructure is proximate. Beirut is a densely built up city. There is no place that the leaders can meet that doesn't endanger civilians in an assassination strike. Military leaders simply don't meet up in pastures on hilltops. I also don't accept the common belief that Arab muslims have always hated Jews and that they are all dead-set on killing all the Jews and therefore there is no other solution but to kill them all. CAVEAT: Right now lots of Arab muslims want to kill all the Jews out of revenge (and for their safety), and lots of Israelis want to kill all the Arabs out of revenge (and for their safety). But these are not permanent stances, they are reactionary emotions. If you sympathize with Israelis feeling unsafe, how much more unsafe do you think the muslim Arabs feel? I believe this "permanent irreconcilable enmity" fiction was sowed by religious extremists who needed an excuse to capture the land they believe God promised them. I know from history that this enmity with the Arabs started only 80 years ago. Yes there are ancient hadith prophesys about Arabs winning a battle against Jews, but that isn't a central tenet of any of their scriptures -- every culture hated Jews back then: Russians, Greeks, Germans, Arabs, pretty much everybody agreed to be racist against Jews back in those days. And a prophecy of a particualr battle against Jews sometime in the future is scant evidence for "permanent irreconcilable enmity." Before 1948 Jews considered Arabs their brothers under Ishmael. Jews were fleeing persecution in Europe and from Russia, not from Arabs. They coined the term anti-Semite which includes all the Arabs alongside all the Jews because their enemy wasn't the Arabs, it was the Nazis and pre-Nazi Europeans and Russians. Jews included the Arabs as their brothers in the term "Semite". The term worked and became very powerful so they can't change it now, but it exposes the truth... that Arabs didn't used to be their enemy. Groups like the Houthis have nothing to gain by doing what they are doing. They have no economic interest in their actions. They are 100% selflessly defending the Palestinians at their own expense and lives. I've never seen that before in geopolitics but it gives me renewed faith in humanity, that a people would do what they believe is the right thing even against their own interest. They have made it very clear why and under what conditions they would stop. Those conditions require movements towards friendship. All Israel needs to do is start sowing friendship, it doesn't need to kill all it's enemies. But Israel only sows enmity. The only tool they wield is murder. All negotiations are head fakes and deceptions. If they never sow friendship, they will never reap it. The more murder they sow, the more enemies they have. They now have enemies in every nation on earth, and nations are far more explicitly distancing themselves from Israel. Great Job, Bibi. But It is never too late. I am a person of hope and change, not of hate and vengence. I believe Israel can still recover from this and grow their economy far beyond what it was, and have peace with all of its neighbors. Yes there will be reprocussions for a long time to come, and terrorists who want revenge for their families for at least another 40 years. But eventually Israel can recover if it wants to. If it keeps going down the path it is going down it will probably end in a number of nuclear explosions. Really really low social intelligence religious nut jobs are running the ship right now, but I believe that ship can still be rescued even at this late hour.