Great, line, as often, broad historical perspective is enlightening:
"This is the 21st century, where the horrors of war are televised worldwide. The political fallout, and the resultant economic and military consequences, would quite simply mean the end of Israel. Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn’t thought it through, and/or is as delusional as the Jewish zealots of 2000 years ago who thought they could hole themselves up in Jerusalem and defeat the Roman Empire."
The Syrian rebels took Syria in 2 weeks (where the horrors of war are televised worldwide). They keep committing atrocities and the leader keeps getting invited to meeting with world leaders.
Like it or not Israel is judged worldwide on a far higher moral plane than Syrian or other Arab armed forces and we implicitly accept that higher standard.
Once we were discussing how the Hasmonean revolt differed from Bar Kochba's revolt. In both instances, the Jews are outnumbered. Nonetheless, the Hasmoneans achieved independence for almost two centuries, while Bar Kochba had independence for around three years, until Rome used a scorched earth policy and crushed his rebellion.
I understand that the Hasmonean rebellion had more favorable conditions for the Jews. The Greek Empire broke up into 4 parts, and the other parts were hoping to weaken the Syrian Greek part by assisting the Hasmoneans.
You make many good points about Gazans. Reminds me of when my kids were young and we would be driving to Indiana to visit the grandparents. My kids, all under age 6, would chime in, "Daddy, drive 'limit speed," you aren't driving 'limit speed' and everybody is passing us." I would tell them everybody is not passing us, it just seems that way because you can't see all the cars that are not passing us.
Because Shmuel HaNavi and Medrash Kohelet said it all. You must have been influenced by Pope Leo’s speech. You’re on the same page. And I subscribe because sometimes you have interesting and intelligent things to say.
If there are innocents in Azza then why are they not giving voice to their concerns.
Don't tell me it's because they are afraid. There are many many many examples of people who were afraid but still stood up against evil. Point in question Warsaw uprising. They new that they would probably not survive and yet still they stood up for truth, fought and ultimately died.
If there are "innocents" in Azza let them stand up and be counted.
This is absolutely true. Everyone likes to enjoy the fantasy that THEY would be the ones to stand up to evil tyranny. In reality, people start compromising their values long in advance of outright tyranny as they sense where their own path to survival will lie. You can see something like this in the US with Trump. Republicans who would never in a million years would want this guy very quickly sense that this is the guy with the power and realize they better "get on board", and it's so easy to dismiss your principles anyway. Who's checking? Principles don't pay the bills.
If you're living in a dictatorship, and your life and your family's lives are riding on what you do and say in public and in private, going along is the only option for most people. And because of cognitive dissonance, most people will not in fact think "I'm going along with evil to save myself." They will adjust their beliefs so that the evil is not so evil after all, or that they are not really going along with it.
I think this is part of what people often miss in Neimoller's "First they came" poem: To preserve your own well-being, you will rationalize away the assault on other people's well-being. That means you will find reasons why innocent people are not "actually" so innocent, and deserve what they get. And you see the same thing with innocent civilians in Gaza. How many times have we heard from Jewish sources, "well, they're not so innocent," and somehow the idea that a 5 year-old is not innocent is accepted uncritically.
As far as the Warsaw ghetto, those people were brave beyond belief, but if you know you are probably going to die one way or the other, that's a different calculation. They were prisoners fighting for a slim chance at their own survival, they were not making a moral stand "for truth" against the tyranny of their own government. I don't really see the comparison you are making.
Thank you, Natan. Regarding innocents in Gaza, I just want to add that even if someone cheered for Hamas, as ugly as that is I still don't believe it would be acceptable to starve them.
The alternative to letting humanitarian aid into Gaza doesn't have to be "let's starve them".
The problem until now has been that the humanitarian aid is seized by Hamas, and, instead of being distributed to the populace for free, Hamas sells it to the Gazans (I don't know how they have any money at this point with which to buy provisions, if the Gazans aren't already on the Hamas payroll). So, the humanitarian aid ends up benefiting Hamas.
Ideally (and I believe Israel is trying to do this), the IDF should set up distribution stations in the major Gazan cities to distribute humanitarian aid, while ensuring that it doesn't fall into the hands of Hamas. That unfortunately leaves our soldiers as sitting ducks to terrorist attacks.
Israel is trying military pressure and taking territory away from Hamas control, which can be used as leverage to force Hamas to release the hostages. But I saw one headline that quoted an Israeli military expert who expects two more years of fighting to totally defeat Hamas in Gaza. I don't think Israelis have that much patience.
Ok, but in order to be credible you need to provide a REAL alternative (sending special forces to kill only Hamas and 'save the princess is not one of them).
So, what's your plan to win the war? How many soldiers are you willing to lose? Are you willing to fight for 10 years?
G‑d forbid the entire world turns anti-Semitic—something not too far off from the current state of about 90% of the UN—Israel can still survive! They have what we call the A-bomb, and enough of them to cause serious damage to half the world. That alone should give the world pause. That is, in a sense our ultimate guarantee. It can be the fallback plan.
It's not rational to think it would actually come to pass where "everyone" in the world hates us. However, if it did, we would have the opportunity to pull a Shimshon HaGibor—"Let my soul die with the Philistines." That’s still a better option than Auschwitz.
I just wish you had more confidence in what we've built up in Israel! We are here to stay!
I'm disappointed that you can't see the suicidal insanity in your comment.
You can't survive with a just an A-bomb. You also need a military and food and a million other things for a country to survive, especially against hostile enemies. And you want to squander all those and then threaten to nuke the world and take everyone out with us?!
Maybe a better option is simply to try NOT to turn the entire world against us? Like, is that an option that perhaps should be considered?
I am in complete agreement with you, that we must work with the rest of the world. We even must try to "appease" them as best as we could.
What I was referring to, is what the great Herzl wanted - Israel would be a country that can defend itself, even in a far fetched scenarios, like "everyone" hating us.
“Israel is actually going beyond what international law requires in terms of protecting civilians (and what concerns them is that Israel is still losing dramatically in the court of public opinion, which does not bode well for any future US large-scale war involving far greater numbers of civilian casualties)”
I honestly think the US would not have to deal with the same level of prejudice.
I feel like Russia isn’t judged as harshly in its war against Ukraine as Israel is attempting to dismantle a terrorist group and rescue hostages, despite the documented mass rape and massacre at Bucha in Ukraine by Russian troops.
The question then becomes, what’s the missing ingredient?
Thanks for this post. As you probably know, in the US Orthodox community it is essentially forbidden to express any reservations about Israel's conduct of the war. I don't think I've seen a single letter or column in the local Jewish paper suggesting that the destruction of Palestinian civilian life and property could be at all morally problematic. Basically everyone has turned off their moral sensors. Ten-thousand dead, fifty-thousand dead, who cares? Whatever Israel does it right, nothing else matters.
In a war against 40,000 terrorists embedded among civilians due to their strategy of maximizing civilian deaths on their own side in order to politically harm Israel, I would expect around 200,000 deaths in order to secure victory.
I see two aspects to this, and will leave aside the Israeli government's complicity in allowing Hamas to develop such strength and it's failure to protect its citizens, both of which I think would have demanded (even now!) the resignation of that government. In law, a juror has an obligation to recuse themselves if they have prior involvement or conflict of interest that might bias their judgment in the proceeding. In this case, the failure of the government in the run-up to Oct 7 is clearly such a biasing factor with regard to its future actions. So put that aside.
1) External: You can argue whether the death of so many civilians is militarily unavoidable, or that the civilian to combatant ratio is "actually quite good," as I've seen many people put it. It doesn't matter. All that anyone around the world will remember for generations is that the Israelis wiped out tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Now I know there are those who will say, "Well, all those people around the world hated us anyway," but I think this untrue and rather nihilistic. For all those who over many years saw Palestinian activists chanting about genocide and ethnic cleansing, and thought "well, that's a little extreme, it's a complicated situation," the Gaza offensive has removed all their doubts. All those Palestinian slogans have been proven absolutely true in the eyes of the world. It used to be easy to argue that Israel has no desire to exterminate the Palestinians. Now it's an insurmountable mountain to climb.
2) Internal: The Orthodox community has completely sacrificed its internal moral sense on the idea that Israel can do no wrong. Several times I have heard "Just kill them all already" from Orthodox Jews. The deaths of tens of thousands of civilians by the Israeli military is dismissed casually as "too bad, so sad," and it's apparent that contrary to how we like to flatter ourselves about being more concerned for the Palestinian lives than Hamas is, we actually don't care at all. We'll kill as many civilians as we want to get to our goals. And while we are not "targeting" civilians for death as terrorists do, Israel is clearly using civilian death and hunger to pressure Hamas, so now the moral position that civilians should be off-limits has been completely eroded. We have ceded all the moral high ground, and I don't think it was worth it. Feel free to disagree, as I'm sure everyone will.
Because as Israel is conducting the war, it is not, and everyone has already reached that conclusion. Ever hear of WWII? A couple million German civilians dead. Lesson: don't start a war by committing atrocities, then refuse to surrender. That tends to end badly.
What’s your view on the Mahara”l (and others) who say that during wartime there are no innocents amongst the enemy - certainly not once they’ve been offered the opportunity to leave the battle area.
The Maharal wasn’t as far as I know ever an actual soldier. If you placed a sword in his hands and told him to actually kill children he might have changed his opinion.
The right way to do this is to hire non-hamas palestinians and let them distribute the food. Let them drive the trucks and give them weapons to fend off the hamas vultures
The right way to do this is to hire non-hamas palestinians and let them distribute the food. Let them drive the trucks and give them weapons to fend off the hamas vultures
The right way to do this is to hire non-hamas palestinians and let them distribute the food. Let them drive the trucks and give them weapons to fend off the hamas vultures
I don't think anyone wants to starve two million people in Gaza. Hamas is a small part of the population, and the majority of people just want to live happily, make a living, and try to support their families. and even if they hate Israel, they would not want to die for that. What Israel is doing is making life tight in Gaza—food is rationed, there's no school for the children. Many have to live in tents and they wait on line with pots in hand for food. This is a twofold strategy: either people will decide themselves they want to get out of the region and live normal lives, or if they stay, they will think long and hard about whether it's worth Hamas killing a few Jews, only for them to then live in poverty and hardship for years. No one is going to kill all of them, so let's be reasonable.
2
Yes, you're right—it is ludicrous to forcibly move an entire nation to another land. Trump always has these tall, bright ideas. Another one of his "brilliant" ideas was thinking China would pay these tariffs. Once America starts hurting, because there won't be enough cheap goods to sustain our lifestyle, demonstration start, he will fold like a cheap camera.
However, the more you increase poverty and hardship in Gaza, the more people will just want to get out and look voluntarily for other places to go at their first opportunity. Israel is playing it right—keep up the negotiations for another year or two and by the end, frustration will drive most normal people in Gaza to want to leave.
3
You say the Yidden were crazy and delusional for fighting the superior Romans when they turned the screws and abused them in their own homeland. Let me ask you: were the Warsaw Ghetto fighters idiots for resisting the Nazis? Were the partisans crazy? You can make that claim about anyone who tried to fight for their freedom but ultimately lost.
It still shows courage to try rather than just lie down and be trampled on. Everyone said the same thing about the early Zionist pioneers trying to go back to Israel—thousands told them they were messianic and delusional. However, they succeeded, thank God (B"H). however, if G-d forbid they were not - you would be saying they were delusional.
1. Sure there are people who want to do that. You can find one of them in the comments to this post.
2. Half the population already wants to leave, but nobody is willing to take them, so they can't.
3. The Warsaw rebels knew that they weren't going to win. It wasn't about winning, it was about going down fighting. With the early Zionists, there was a chance of success, and no major drawbacks.
Point 3 - I was responding to your statement that "the Jewish rebels were delusional." Many people have fought even for the slightest chance at freedom rather than remain slaves. Many saw death as preferable to a life of abuse and suffering. Rabbi Akiva and Bar Koziba were nearly victorious, as we see the Roman general when he gave his report in front of the senate, for the first time in history, could not say "My army is okay." Some didn’t even fight—like in Gamala, (in the Golan Heights) where they threw themselves from the heights of the mountains to avoid falling into Roman hands. It is not more fair to call them suicidal, then to call the rebels delusional. They simply fought a good fight but lost!
Point 2 -When the war in Gaza is over, slowly, there will be places in the world that would take them. There are several or quite a few countries that are losing population due to various reasons. To keep their economy stable they will need more people. More people = work and consume product.
One example is Ireland. Up front they wont say they will take Gazans, bit once it quiets down, they can use a few hundred thousand to fill the void.
Also Israel can offer a monetary incentive and it is a double win for those countries. Look beyond the rhetoric. .
1) "the majority of people just want to live happily, make a living, and try to support their families." Are you sure of that? Would you let your daughter spend time with them?
"Yes, you're right—it is ludicrous to forcibly move an entire nation to another land. "
Moving two million out is not that ludicrous. It worked for the Irish. No morally sane person wants to live under a terrorist regime that steals their food and water and turns their schools and hospitals into bullseyes. And the latest poll indicates that half the Gaza population may well be morally sane.
Great, line, as often, broad historical perspective is enlightening:
"This is the 21st century, where the horrors of war are televised worldwide. The political fallout, and the resultant economic and military consequences, would quite simply mean the end of Israel. Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn’t thought it through, and/or is as delusional as the Jewish zealots of 2000 years ago who thought they could hole themselves up in Jerusalem and defeat the Roman Empire."
So you can't win wars anymore?
The Syrian rebels took Syria in 2 weeks (where the horrors of war are televised worldwide). They keep committing atrocities and the leader keeps getting invited to meeting with world leaders.
Like it or not Israel is judged worldwide on a far higher moral plane than Syrian or other Arab armed forces and we implicitly accept that higher standard.
So we cannot win wars anymore?
Once we were discussing how the Hasmonean revolt differed from Bar Kochba's revolt. In both instances, the Jews are outnumbered. Nonetheless, the Hasmoneans achieved independence for almost two centuries, while Bar Kochba had independence for around three years, until Rome used a scorched earth policy and crushed his rebellion.
I understand that the Hasmonean rebellion had more favorable conditions for the Jews. The Greek Empire broke up into 4 parts, and the other parts were hoping to weaken the Syrian Greek part by assisting the Hasmoneans.
You make many good points about Gazans. Reminds me of when my kids were young and we would be driving to Indiana to visit the grandparents. My kids, all under age 6, would chime in, "Daddy, drive 'limit speed," you aren't driving 'limit speed' and everybody is passing us." I would tell them everybody is not passing us, it just seems that way because you can't see all the cars that are not passing us.
No mercy. Free the hostages or starve.
Why do you bother subscribing if you're not going to address the arguments that I bring?
Because Shmuel HaNavi and Medrash Kohelet said it all. You must have been influenced by Pope Leo’s speech. You’re on the same page. And I subscribe because sometimes you have interesting and intelligent things to say.
Well, if you're not going to address the arguments I presented, I don't want your comments.
Great. Refund my subscription
If there are innocents in Azza then why are they not giving voice to their concerns.
Don't tell me it's because they are afraid. There are many many many examples of people who were afraid but still stood up against evil. Point in question Warsaw uprising. They new that they would probably not survive and yet still they stood up for truth, fought and ultimately died.
If there are "innocents" in Azza let them stand up and be counted.
Another logical error. *Some* people have the strength to stand up against evil. Most people don't.
This is absolutely true. Everyone likes to enjoy the fantasy that THEY would be the ones to stand up to evil tyranny. In reality, people start compromising their values long in advance of outright tyranny as they sense where their own path to survival will lie. You can see something like this in the US with Trump. Republicans who would never in a million years would want this guy very quickly sense that this is the guy with the power and realize they better "get on board", and it's so easy to dismiss your principles anyway. Who's checking? Principles don't pay the bills.
If you're living in a dictatorship, and your life and your family's lives are riding on what you do and say in public and in private, going along is the only option for most people. And because of cognitive dissonance, most people will not in fact think "I'm going along with evil to save myself." They will adjust their beliefs so that the evil is not so evil after all, or that they are not really going along with it.
I think this is part of what people often miss in Neimoller's "First they came" poem: To preserve your own well-being, you will rationalize away the assault on other people's well-being. That means you will find reasons why innocent people are not "actually" so innocent, and deserve what they get. And you see the same thing with innocent civilians in Gaza. How many times have we heard from Jewish sources, "well, they're not so innocent," and somehow the idea that a 5 year-old is not innocent is accepted uncritically.
As far as the Warsaw ghetto, those people were brave beyond belief, but if you know you are probably going to die one way or the other, that's a different calculation. They were prisoners fighting for a slim chance at their own survival, they were not making a moral stand "for truth" against the tyranny of their own government. I don't really see the comparison you are making.
Thank you, Natan. Regarding innocents in Gaza, I just want to add that even if someone cheered for Hamas, as ugly as that is I still don't believe it would be acceptable to starve them.
The alternative to letting humanitarian aid into Gaza doesn't have to be "let's starve them".
The problem until now has been that the humanitarian aid is seized by Hamas, and, instead of being distributed to the populace for free, Hamas sells it to the Gazans (I don't know how they have any money at this point with which to buy provisions, if the Gazans aren't already on the Hamas payroll). So, the humanitarian aid ends up benefiting Hamas.
Ideally (and I believe Israel is trying to do this), the IDF should set up distribution stations in the major Gazan cities to distribute humanitarian aid, while ensuring that it doesn't fall into the hands of Hamas. That unfortunately leaves our soldiers as sitting ducks to terrorist attacks.
Right, but that's not what Ben Gvir and others are arguing.
But what moral alternatives does Israel have?
Israel is trying military pressure and taking territory away from Hamas control, which can be used as leverage to force Hamas to release the hostages. But I saw one headline that quoted an Israeli military expert who expects two more years of fighting to totally defeat Hamas in Gaza. I don't think Israelis have that much patience.
"Israeli military experts" told us that Hamas was contained.
But "Contained" does not mean defeated.
Indeed not.
Exactly
Ok, but in order to be credible you need to provide a REAL alternative (sending special forces to kill only Hamas and 'save the princess is not one of them).
So, what's your plan to win the war? How many soldiers are you willing to lose? Are you willing to fight for 10 years?
I think differently about Israel than you do.
G‑d forbid the entire world turns anti-Semitic—something not too far off from the current state of about 90% of the UN—Israel can still survive! They have what we call the A-bomb, and enough of them to cause serious damage to half the world. That alone should give the world pause. That is, in a sense our ultimate guarantee. It can be the fallback plan.
It's not rational to think it would actually come to pass where "everyone" in the world hates us. However, if it did, we would have the opportunity to pull a Shimshon HaGibor—"Let my soul die with the Philistines." That’s still a better option than Auschwitz.
I just wish you had more confidence in what we've built up in Israel! We are here to stay!
I'm disappointed that you can't see the suicidal insanity in your comment.
You can't survive with a just an A-bomb. You also need a military and food and a million other things for a country to survive, especially against hostile enemies. And you want to squander all those and then threaten to nuke the world and take everyone out with us?!
Maybe a better option is simply to try NOT to turn the entire world against us? Like, is that an option that perhaps should be considered?
I am in complete agreement with you, that we must work with the rest of the world. We even must try to "appease" them as best as we could.
What I was referring to, is what the great Herzl wanted - Israel would be a country that can defend itself, even in a far fetched scenarios, like "everyone" hating us.
Ok, but for that you need more soldiers (and civilians in terrorist attacks) to die. How many are you willing to sacrifice before it's too much?
“Israel is actually going beyond what international law requires in terms of protecting civilians (and what concerns them is that Israel is still losing dramatically in the court of public opinion, which does not bode well for any future US large-scale war involving far greater numbers of civilian casualties)”
I honestly think the US would not have to deal with the same level of prejudice.
I feel like Russia isn’t judged as harshly in its war against Ukraine as Israel is attempting to dismantle a terrorist group and rescue hostages, despite the documented mass rape and massacre at Bucha in Ukraine by Russian troops.
The question then becomes, what’s the missing ingredient?
Thanks for this post. As you probably know, in the US Orthodox community it is essentially forbidden to express any reservations about Israel's conduct of the war. I don't think I've seen a single letter or column in the local Jewish paper suggesting that the destruction of Palestinian civilian life and property could be at all morally problematic. Basically everyone has turned off their moral sensors. Ten-thousand dead, fifty-thousand dead, who cares? Whatever Israel does it right, nothing else matters.
In a war against 40,000 terrorists embedded among civilians due to their strategy of maximizing civilian deaths on their own side in order to politically harm Israel, I would expect around 200,000 deaths in order to secure victory.
I see two aspects to this, and will leave aside the Israeli government's complicity in allowing Hamas to develop such strength and it's failure to protect its citizens, both of which I think would have demanded (even now!) the resignation of that government. In law, a juror has an obligation to recuse themselves if they have prior involvement or conflict of interest that might bias their judgment in the proceeding. In this case, the failure of the government in the run-up to Oct 7 is clearly such a biasing factor with regard to its future actions. So put that aside.
1) External: You can argue whether the death of so many civilians is militarily unavoidable, or that the civilian to combatant ratio is "actually quite good," as I've seen many people put it. It doesn't matter. All that anyone around the world will remember for generations is that the Israelis wiped out tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Now I know there are those who will say, "Well, all those people around the world hated us anyway," but I think this untrue and rather nihilistic. For all those who over many years saw Palestinian activists chanting about genocide and ethnic cleansing, and thought "well, that's a little extreme, it's a complicated situation," the Gaza offensive has removed all their doubts. All those Palestinian slogans have been proven absolutely true in the eyes of the world. It used to be easy to argue that Israel has no desire to exterminate the Palestinians. Now it's an insurmountable mountain to climb.
2) Internal: The Orthodox community has completely sacrificed its internal moral sense on the idea that Israel can do no wrong. Several times I have heard "Just kill them all already" from Orthodox Jews. The deaths of tens of thousands of civilians by the Israeli military is dismissed casually as "too bad, so sad," and it's apparent that contrary to how we like to flatter ourselves about being more concerned for the Palestinian lives than Hamas is, we actually don't care at all. We'll kill as many civilians as we want to get to our goals. And while we are not "targeting" civilians for death as terrorists do, Israel is clearly using civilian death and hunger to pressure Hamas, so now the moral position that civilians should be off-limits has been completely eroded. We have ceded all the moral high ground, and I don't think it was worth it. Feel free to disagree, as I'm sure everyone will.
Because as Israel is conducting the war, it is not, and everyone has already reached that conclusion. Ever hear of WWII? A couple million German civilians dead. Lesson: don't start a war by committing atrocities, then refuse to surrender. That tends to end badly.
70 million deaths in WWII. It ended badly for almost everyone. Maybe that's the lesson.
But it's a good thing we fought it, right? ; )
Yes.
"They are mistaken, for the reasons that I discussed,"
I'm not sure you realize what this sounds like.
What’s your view on the Mahara”l (and others) who say that during wartime there are no innocents amongst the enemy - certainly not once they’ve been offered the opportunity to leave the battle area.
The Maharal wasn’t as far as I know ever an actual soldier. If you placed a sword in his hands and told him to actually kill children he might have changed his opinion.
They don't have the opportunity to leave the area - Egypt has sealed its border,
Why has Israel not pushed Egypt to accept Gazans? There could be leverage through the ICJ, US, and UN.
It's not that easy. Even Trump couldn't do it.
Why can’t Israel send boats to pick people up instead of sending trucks for Hamas to steal the food?
Because no one cares what Egypt does because they're not Israel.
Thank you once again for your cogent analysis.
The right way to do this is to hire non-hamas palestinians and let them distribute the food. Let them drive the trucks and give them weapons to fend off the hamas vultures
The right way to do this is to hire non-hamas palestinians and let them distribute the food. Let them drive the trucks and give them weapons to fend off the hamas vultures
The right way to do this is to hire non-hamas palestinians and let them distribute the food. Let them drive the trucks and give them weapons to fend off the hamas vultures
Hello Rabbi Slifkin,
3 points about your article.
1
I don't think anyone wants to starve two million people in Gaza. Hamas is a small part of the population, and the majority of people just want to live happily, make a living, and try to support their families. and even if they hate Israel, they would not want to die for that. What Israel is doing is making life tight in Gaza—food is rationed, there's no school for the children. Many have to live in tents and they wait on line with pots in hand for food. This is a twofold strategy: either people will decide themselves they want to get out of the region and live normal lives, or if they stay, they will think long and hard about whether it's worth Hamas killing a few Jews, only for them to then live in poverty and hardship for years. No one is going to kill all of them, so let's be reasonable.
2
Yes, you're right—it is ludicrous to forcibly move an entire nation to another land. Trump always has these tall, bright ideas. Another one of his "brilliant" ideas was thinking China would pay these tariffs. Once America starts hurting, because there won't be enough cheap goods to sustain our lifestyle, demonstration start, he will fold like a cheap camera.
However, the more you increase poverty and hardship in Gaza, the more people will just want to get out and look voluntarily for other places to go at their first opportunity. Israel is playing it right—keep up the negotiations for another year or two and by the end, frustration will drive most normal people in Gaza to want to leave.
3
You say the Yidden were crazy and delusional for fighting the superior Romans when they turned the screws and abused them in their own homeland. Let me ask you: were the Warsaw Ghetto fighters idiots for resisting the Nazis? Were the partisans crazy? You can make that claim about anyone who tried to fight for their freedom but ultimately lost.
It still shows courage to try rather than just lie down and be trampled on. Everyone said the same thing about the early Zionist pioneers trying to go back to Israel—thousands told them they were messianic and delusional. However, they succeeded, thank God (B"H). however, if G-d forbid they were not - you would be saying they were delusional.
1. Sure there are people who want to do that. You can find one of them in the comments to this post.
2. Half the population already wants to leave, but nobody is willing to take them, so they can't.
3. The Warsaw rebels knew that they weren't going to win. It wasn't about winning, it was about going down fighting. With the early Zionists, there was a chance of success, and no major drawbacks.
On point 3 one could say the same about the Judean rebels.
Also in a recent book “For the Freedom of Zion”, Professor MacLean argues that the rebels had a better than average chance to defeat the Romans.
The Romans were not out to kill us all.
I've read MacLean's excellent book. I do not recall him saying that.
Point 3 - I was responding to your statement that "the Jewish rebels were delusional." Many people have fought even for the slightest chance at freedom rather than remain slaves. Many saw death as preferable to a life of abuse and suffering. Rabbi Akiva and Bar Koziba were nearly victorious, as we see the Roman general when he gave his report in front of the senate, for the first time in history, could not say "My army is okay." Some didn’t even fight—like in Gamala, (in the Golan Heights) where they threw themselves from the heights of the mountains to avoid falling into Roman hands. It is not more fair to call them suicidal, then to call the rebels delusional. They simply fought a good fight but lost!
Point 2 -When the war in Gaza is over, slowly, there will be places in the world that would take them. There are several or quite a few countries that are losing population due to various reasons. To keep their economy stable they will need more people. More people = work and consume product.
One example is Ireland. Up front they wont say they will take Gazans, bit once it quiets down, they can use a few hundred thousand to fill the void.
Also Israel can offer a monetary incentive and it is a double win for those countries. Look beyond the rhetoric. .
But the choice here is not between freedom or slavery. Nor is it between starving 2 million people or death.
Absolutely said that. Read the end again
He also told it to me personally.
1) "the majority of people just want to live happily, make a living, and try to support their families." Are you sure of that? Would you let your daughter spend time with them?
"Yes, you're right—it is ludicrous to forcibly move an entire nation to another land. "
Moving two million out is not that ludicrous. It worked for the Irish. No morally sane person wants to live under a terrorist regime that steals their food and water and turns their schools and hospitals into bullseyes. And the latest poll indicates that half the Gaza population may well be morally sane.
What is ludicrous is forcing them to stay.