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You are making it seem as if Hamas are some legitimate resistance organization. They are not, they are brutal oppressors of their own. Their history also goes back further than 30 years, starting out as an offspring of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Radical Islamists like these are enemies of humanity and need to be eliminated. In order for Palestine to be free, they need to go first, with both Gaza and the West Bank experiencing the equivalent of denazification in order to prevent Islamofascism from rising up again in a few years after the end of this war. What should also happen at the same time is that the Israeli equivalent, the settlers, meeting the same fate, but expecting Israeli society to critically look inward when they are somewhat justifiably going through a phase of siege mentality isn't exactly realistic. If Hamas only goal was to prevent Israelis and Palestinians growing used to coexisting, then they most certainly succeeded at that, for decades to come. The times when tens of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel and up to 100,000 were treated in Israeli hospitals per year - both of which played a huge part in enabling peaceful coexistence - are most definitely over, likely for many decades to come.

The slow genocide claim is absurd. Since when has any genocide resulted in more births from the supposed victims than the alleged genociders? Palestinian birth rates are high, consistently higher than Israel's, and before the war, this also applied to obesity - in both Gaza and the West Bank. How exactly were they conducting this genocide? By making them all die from heart-disease due to overeating? Life expectancy was higher than the average in the Middle East too, which most certainly is not what would happen during an actual genocide. Even at the current rate of this war, it would take over 80 years for Gaza to be depopulated, assuming no new births. As horrific as the current war is, it's "just" a war, but it's perhaps the most televised (to use a slightly outdated term) and propagandized war in history, a battlefield in the current global Cold War between the West and an unholy alliance of Russia, Iran, China and their vassals. Most people following the war seem to be simply unprepared for the ugliness of an asymmetrical between a ruthless movement that would rather sacrifice every single Palestinian man, woman and child than surrender - vs. a military that after October 7th appears to be compelled to strike with the big hammer to prevent any chance of events similar to that ever happening again. It's a dangerous combination. I'm glad that for all the mistakes the IDF has made that they haven't given up on roof-knocking and similar warnings, which is why despite the immense destruction of buildings, far fewer people have died than in past wars that saw similar destruction. Doesn't help the many innocent who are still caught between a rock and a hard place, of course.

I find it rich to blame Israel for the violence in the region. The original sin claim is almost offensive, given that the Holocaust led directly to its creation and that the young nation was attacked on day one of its existence. Seems to me like you want to blame the Jews for the antisemitism that caused both the Holocaust and the Arab League attacking Israel.

The creation of Israel itself is not the problem and neither is its continued existence. One would have to be utterly naive to assume that if Israel didn't exist, there would be anything close to peace in a region as messy as the Middle East. The problem is that there are 22 Arab nations (or about 50 Muslim-majority nations), many of which can not accept the existence of a single tiny Jewish nation. One look at the treatment Palestinian Arabs are receiving in other Arab nation tells us just how little they actually care about the fate of this people. There could have been an Arab Palestinian nation from day one, but instead, Arab leaders wanted to take it all and subject the survivors of the Holocaust to yet another genocide a mere three years after the end of the previous attempt. When they failed, they occupied Gaza and the West Bank instead of allowing the people there to forge their own destiny, which shows that Palestinian freedom was never even a consideration.

This doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge the crimes against humanity that came with the creation of Israel. The Nakba was inexcusable, there is no doubt about it. Israel should honestly deal with this part of its history instead of trying to suppress it. Using it as an excuse to keep a subset of the Arabian people in a perpetual state of statelessness however is nothing but irresponsible. It cannot be that Palestinian Arabs are the only humans on this planet who can pass down their refugee status, that they cannot gain citizenship in many Arab nations, leaving them trapped in this absurd limbo. By that logic, half of the people in my little town in Germany would be classified as refugees. Several Israeli cities that started out as refugee camps (housing many of the close to one million Jews that were expelled from Middle Eastern and North African nation at the same time as the Nakba) would also still have this status.

Meanwhile, while we squabble about this one conflict, far more horrific wars like the one in Sudan, where people armed with nothing but rusty AKs and blades are massacring more people in a single day as died over the course of months of fighting in Gaza. What are we doing here? Why is everyone so focused on this one war instead of appropriately dividing their attention and outrage? Is it the cultural and religious significance of this small part of the Middle East? Is it an echo of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union suddenly switched from supporting a sympathetic Israel to aiding its enemies, dragging much of the educated left with it in a move that seems right out of Orwell's playbook? It almost feels like the entire human species is suffering from a collective form of ADHD, unable to address actually important problems and instead procrastinating with what should be nothing but a small regional conflict of limited global importance. I'm not saying that we shouldn't pay some attention to it, but it just feels wrong for it to dominate the foreign policy part of our public discourse so much.

Sorry for the that stream of consciousness in the last paragraph. Wasn't planned.