| Israel has not overreacted to Oct 7, they have just applied the same policy that they have used for many decades "at least ten of theirs for each one of ours". This policy is an effective deterrent against enemies, but it should be obvious that with such a policy it will never be possible to end any conflict unless absolutely all enemies and all their relatives or friends are killed. There have been times when the relations between the parties in this conflict had improved a lot and there was some hope for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Nevertheless on both sides, but especially in Israel, there are people who benefit a lot from the existence of the conflict, so any opponents have been removed by any means possible, including assassination, until the mutual relationships have become as bad as today, when no hope for any kind of peace remains. Most people in Israel are quite nice, but they are deeply scared by the thought that that at any time someone coming from the neighbors of Israel could come and cut their throats, so they work continuously very hard at their jobs, believing that they must provide thus their individual contributions so that Israel will maintain its military and economic dominance over their enemies, in order to ensure their safety. The workers of Israel have worked all the time since WWII pretty much as hard as those of USA during its short participation to WWII. Workers from other countries would be very unlikely to work willingly so hard as those of Israel. This is very profitable for the upper class of Israel, for whom an end of the conflict would have caused serious losses, when the workers could not have been motivated any more by patriotic slogans. |
The interesting thing is that Hamas seems to share Israel's view that Israelis are more valuable than Palestinians. Whenever there is a prisoner exchange Hamas tends to demand an order of magnitude or more Palestinians be released for each Israeli released.
For example in 2011 Hamas got over 1000 in exchange for a single Israeli.