| HN Mirror

> Didn't we just try this in Gaza?

Not really. The territory abandoned was systematically kept down to the point where any kind of improvement was destroyed again. And much more is being destroyed right now. What do you think all these bombings will do short of just creating the next 20 years of personnel supply for Hamas?

> Abandoned the territory settled?

No, it wasn't just abandoned. The houses that were there were gone and the houses that were built were demolished. So the land was barren. That's not giving the other party a chance, that's the kind of scorched earth tactics that make things worse.

> Imagine if Hamas controlled both Gaza and the West Bank? Israel would be destroyed.

Yes, Hamas is a problem, we are in agreement on that. But so is the Israeli government, the problem is to get them both to back down from their violence-begets-more-violence cycle. And it looks like things are going to get a lot worse rather than better. So you can expect many more Israeli lives to be lost as well as many more Palestinian lives.

> UN peacekeeping is bullshit. What country is going to trust the UN to guarantee it's security. There is UN peacekeeping in Lebanon where attacks against Israel are and were coming from, they do zilch. The history of UN peacekeepers in the region is that at any hint of violence they move away.

I have had family members in Unifil deployments and that's not what I hear. Both sides criticize the UN peacekeepers as being on the side of their enemy, that's usually a good sign.

> On the Israeli side nobody will trust the Palestinians over anything.

Makes you wonder why there isn't a solution possible. But: with the dubious ways in which Hamas was financed there may be enough blame to go around for everybody.

> There's also a minority that believes the entire land belongs to Israel and screw the Palestinians.

Unfortunately that minority has a disproportionate effect on Israeli politics. It should be obvious that this is one of the root causes of this ongoing conflict.

> On the Palestinian side (IMO) there's a majority that is unwilling to take any settlement other than all the Jews should leave the middle east. There's fractures and nobody that represents all of them that can agree and/or enforce any agreement. So here we are.

I'm missing the proxy war that the Arab world has been fighting against Israel using the Palestinians in just as much a cynical way as the right wing in Israel has been using them to keep the conflict alive as much as possible.