[literatepeople]

It's hard to describe to people who don't have family there, but this exactly. The goal is similar to American "manifest destiny". They want to, through whatever means necessary, displace (at best) the existing Palestinian population and take their land.

[beepbopboopp]

Please explain to me what you mean.

From my perspective, they handed over control of the region and have had countless opportunities since the handoff to occupy the land permanently had they so chosen. Couldn't it just as easily be argued that they no longer trust sharing a border with them?

[2muchcoffeeman]

I feel like it would have been harder to get this far without international support had the Oct 7th attack not happened. I don’t know about you, but I’d be a bit more lenient if you’re trying to rescue civilian hostages.

I don’t know anything about the impetus for the Oct 7th attack was, but you have to wonder why.

[beepbopboopp]

Im not following this comment. Please say it again.

[HDThoreaun]

Israel wants the west bank and golan heights. Gaza is worthless, no one wants it. Israel tried to pay egypt to take it and egypt refused.

[flyinglizard]

Israelis voted in a government 20 years ago just to pull out from Gaza and give them their autonomy (which Gazans used to swiftly vote in Hamas, and that was the single and last time they had elections since). Saying Israel was interested in that land is disingenuous.

[Zacharias030]

settling the west bank breaking international law while claiming otherwise strikes me as disingenuous.

[BigJ1211]

Israel definitely wants the West Bank (and the Golan Heights), it didn't demonstrate the same interest in Gaza. Which isn't that strange considering there's very little value in the land itself.

They were content with the Palestinians keeping to themselves in that corner of the land. At least that's what it looked like between 2005 and 2023. That isn't to say they had no designs on it further in the future, they might have had plans to annex it after fully claiming the West Bank. (Or at least certain groups within Israel)

[flyinglizard]

If Israel, the state, had interest in the West Bank it'd have annexed it already. There is a group, admittedly growing as a result of the processes happening in the Israeli society, which is very interested in the West Bank. But it was never the official position of the state.

West Bank should have went to the Palestinians following the Oslo accords, and it partly did, but that all came to a halt with the deadly suicide attacks led by Hamas on Israel. Another opportunity was in 2000 Camp David accords, but that too ended with the second Intifada. A third opportunity came in the form of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza. Had it been a success story - the Palestinians building their own little Singapore in there, as the world was willing to pour in infinite capital - it would have pushed forward another such a move in the West Bank. But alas it ended with Hamas swiftly coming to power, years of rocket attacks on Israel, then October 7th and the rest is history.

I doubt the Israeli public will ever give the Palestinians anything, at this point; any time a concession was made, Israel found itself in a worse and worse security situation. The great Israeli-Palestinian peace attempt over the past three decades failed miserably.

These populations simply will not coexist, for great many reasons - religious, cultural, historical, tribal, and external.

[runarberg]

This description of Israel’s interest in Gaza does not match their behavior. They have spent millions even billions of dollars terrorizing the population that lives there. They wouldn’t do that if “[t]hey were content with the Palestinians keeping to themselves in that corner of the land”. At the very least Israel saw that land valuable as a place to keep a population oppressed and terrorized, in other words, as a concentration camp or a ghetto.

[flyinglizard]

Their behavior post October 7th, 2023 - the deadliest day for Jews since the holocaust - is very different than before that date. You couldn't expect Israel to keep its hands off approach, could you?

[Zacharias030]

Expect or not, I think it would have made all the difference. It seemed like a historical, Nelson Mandela scale opportunity with all international, regional and domestic & Palestinian winds in Israels back.

And then they used it to one up everything the world has seen in that region in recent past.

[runarberg]

The way I see it is that Palestinians have been fighting for civil rights since 1948 with dismal results. This fight has included violent and non-violent tactics, and the verdict on the non-violent tactics is pretty clear, that it only results in more violence and less civil rights for Palestinians.

Oct. 7 was not only the most deadly day for Jews since the holocaust, it was also the most deadly day for Zionists since the conception of Zionism. Whatever Israel did after Oct. 7 was not to protect Jews, but to protect Zionism. The very same ideology which has stripped Palestinians of their civil rights. And because Zionism is a foundational ideology of Israel, I would expect them to behave exactly the way they did. But I also see Zionism as a fundamentally immoral ideology which should not be a policy of any state. So from a human rights perspective, the right thing for Israel to do since Oct. 7 (as well as much earlier) was to admit defeat, grant Palestinians civil rights (including the right of return and reparations for past wrongs), and abandon Zionism as a policy. Later they could file criminal charges, or have a special tribunal punishing the perpetrators of oct. 7, maybe even as a part of a peace treaty which also grants Palestinians civil rights.

I am not naïve, and I know Israel was never going to do that. That is where international laws should have kicked in which were supposed to pressure Israel into doing the right thing, by doing stuff like sanctions and boycotts. International law, however, failed spectacularly.

EDIT: to prevent misunderstanding, when I say Zionism I mean the belief that Israel should be a Jewish supremacy state on Palestinian lands, like I explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718838