So what you're saying is that boycotting is totally immoral? After all, that's reacting against Israeli civilians, which is not okay according to you.
Or more to the point, why do we always judge Israel and Palestine with 2 different measures? Either Israel as a people and as a country are innocent and "it's only the government", hence boycotts are immoral. XOR people and government are both the same and boycotting every Palestinian everywhere on the planet is normal. Oh and accept that half the people just attack/boycott/refuse to serve or sell anything to all muslims, not just Palestinians, focusing especially on kids and other weak muslims, "because of the situation in Israel". Perhaps even have crowds chanting "gas all muslims" near mosques. And, of course, any kind of public success for Muslims must be brutally attacked, people, spectators, business partners, ... [1] After all, par for the course for Jews ...
Not that anyone on the planet will be surprised that arguments only apply when making Jews evil, not to anyone else (more general any group we don't like, gypsies, the mentally ill, especially against mentally ill children, ...)
Boycotts are fine. Bringing economic pressure on people who's behaviour you want to alter is quite acceptable and normal. Its just killing and displacing them which is the issue.
You might notice that everyone condemned Hamas's Oct 7 attack.
> You might notice that everyone condemned Hamas's Oct 7 attack.
Did they boycott Palestinians after that? Did they boycott Palestinians when they were using aid to execute constant rocket attacks against Israeli civilians?
I never said that, and you are welcome to explain why you think i did.
Coincidentally, regarding that: I think that argument fails . Israel and Palestine are not comparable. Israel is the oppressor. The Goliath. Israel is, just like apartheid south Africa was, a settler colonial project. Considering the amount of time Israel has spent thwarting democratic process in Palestine, resistance movements are not very surprising. Heck, even Hamas was helped from the start by Israel as a means to split the struggle for Palestinian independence. The divide has been very practical for Israel indeed: every time discussions have come up, the official response has been "who should we even negotiate with?".
Support from Hamas has only grown because Fatah has been looked upon as weak because of their many concessions towards Israel that never went anywhere (Fatah being corrupt and incompetent has also played a role, of course)
A large chunk of the world officially boycotted SA apartheid. Sadly our governments do not take their responsibility today, which means people take it into their own hands. That makes for an arbitrary and very uneven form of mob justice.
Can you answer the real question? How do we force Palestinians to accept peace with Israel?
Because none of this explains how you decide on boycotts, and how you intend to achieve peace. If there's one thing all muslim countries have in common, it's oppression. None respect human rights (even Morocco and Turkey, both in some ways more liberal than many European countries, have laws against freedom of religion). Half of them are attacking others. Morocco oppresses Western Sahara, as well as it's own religious minorities. Turkey oppresses Kurds, both inside and outside Turkey. Turkey oppresses religious minorities, also inside and outside Turkey. Both countries, of course, are the "goliaths" in those conflicts. Palestine oppresses religious minorities. Of course, hamas goes further and apparently oppresses most families mafia-style, massacres gay people, oppresses religious minorities (though both PA and hamas have exterminated Palestinian Jews, Shi'a and Druze (yes, they existed), and 90%+ of Palestian Christians)
Obviously this argument cannot justify a boycott against Israel and not against, frankly, every muslim state on the planet.
And those are the very mildest of muslim countries.
Plus, I feel you're not arguing in good faith. I feel like this is like those old cold-war "You have freedom in the Soviet Union" discussions where every discussion goes into total absurdity in an attempt to talk up socialism despite everyone in the room knowing full well that in reality, first, that nobody's free in a socialist country, two, that those discussion have one, and only one, purpose: to prevent reactions to Soviet invasions.
This discussion for you seems to have ONE purpose only: to justify and amplify muslim violence against Israel. Otherwise: answer this question: HOW do we force Palestinians to accept peace with Israel.
If that is a good start, then how do you explain hamas' immediate reaction to Israel respecting Gaza borders in 2006, which they then respected until about a month after Oct 7, 2023.
You see, hamas' reaction was to immediately commit a massacre on Palestinian civilians, and then to start building a rocket arsenal and attacking Israeli civilians with them. So recent history teaches: if Israel were to take your advice, the conflict would become worse. A LOT worse. Immediately.
I'd ask you why this won't just occur again? But hamas has already publicly declared (shouted, in fact) they will go on another massacre and rebuild rockets "the second" this conflict ends. So I feel like that clears up the question.
The fact of the matter is that Palestinians, especially their billionaire "leaders" get a LOT of money, but only if this conflict continues. Until you change that, best of luck. Oh and changing that has a slight problem: neither Gaza nor WB have the slightest chance of making it economically on their own. Despite hamas and PA stealing over 90% of aid, the average income in Gaza and WB is a LOT higher than in Jordan or (especially) Egypt. This is because of aid. Unemployment benefits in Gaza are higher than hospital director wages in Egypt. War pays well for Palestinians, and for "Palestinians" (both hamas and PA give Palestinian passports to whoever asks, in fact, regularly to people who never asked. Last year, suddenly, everyone with an address in the old city in Jerusalem got a Palestinian passport in the mail. And even the muslims (who are pre-civil-war Syrians, whose families got massacred by Palestinians) didn't want them). In fact it pays orders of magnitude more than what they'd make otherwise. And before you say "but people die". Yes, people die. But if you go and actually look at even the claimed hamas-sourced numbers, you'll quickly conclude that less people die in this conflict than in traffic accidents, on average.
To make matters worse, Palestine, both Gaza and WB, are a gateway to immigrating to Europe. You live in, say, Jordan or you're poor in Saudi Arabia. That's a terrible life. So you "immigrate" to WB (Gaza if you're Egyptian). Once you're physically there you get a (bad) apartment and a passport, and in Gaza a job offer to work for Hamas (as cannon fodder, of course, but still). Once you have that passport even the Israeli government will help you get into Europe, assuming you don't go too far in your hamas job. That's how they constantly replenish their population (same way Russia does it: attract immigrants from even worse places, send them to die fighting their "enemy").
> The fact of the matter is that Palestinians, especially their billionnaire "leaders" get a LOT of money
That is quite simply complete bullshit. What is worse is that you are arguing in bad faith.
The facts are as follows:
1) There is an ongoing long-term occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel.
2) Occupation is an act of war. Israel is waging war on Palestine. It is breaking agreements it is a part of.
3) Of course the aim of Israel is to absorb more-or-less all Palestinian territory into Israel proper.
I don't really care about your deflections to Hamas or corruption or whatever, not only because those are the usual talking points of Israeli propaganda and I have seen them repeated about million times, but also because if Israel respected the territorial integrity of Palestine, these would be matters of internal Palestinian politics, and any aggression out of Palestine towards Israel would correctly mean Israel is the victim and Palestine is the aggressor.
But when Israel is occupying most of the Palestinian territory, with the intent to keep it and settle their population there, and all of this are acts of violence, you can't in good faith argue the Palestinians don't have the right to retaliate with force. Note that I don't support Hamas or any form of violence against civilians in any way (I have to mentions this because otherwise I will be wrongly accused of being a Hamas supporter), but until you face the fact that Israel is mass murdering and displacing civilians and taking their real estate and occupying it, we can't really move on.
Israel did not respect Gaza borders. The occupation just continued in another form. This might not be your view, but it has never been a controversial view.
Comparing the economies of Egypt and the west bank is pointless and you know it. The Egypt pound has been devalued to hell and back. It has lost something like 6x in value to the US dollar in 20 years.
The WTO has consistently highlighted the Israeli control over the west bank as the main roadblock to Palestinian economic development and independence.
Regarding the Gazan health ministry, those numbers are confirmed deaths from armed conflict. It does NOT include starved children, or cancer patients who died from the lack of care. Nor does it include people under rubble. It should be considered as the lower bound of deaths.
What we will have to look at afterwards is excess deaths.
You don't force Palestinians to accept peace with Israel.
Force is the root of the problem. Israel will only accept a peace that it defines and that is why it will never have peace. You can't make peace in bad faith
> You don't force Palestinians to accept peace with Israel.
See this is what I mean. The whole discussion is about ONE thing: allowing Palestinians to use whatever violence they want, including mass murder, to "win" (between quotes because the worst thing that could happen to Palestinians is that they win this conflict, as that will immediately cause all their allies to turn to enemies)
Because the other interpretation of this statement is obviously not what you mean. Or do you accept there will be war, and it looks like Palestinians will lose, with whatever consequences that brings, probably leaving?
Palestinians and their allies want war, nothing else. Hell, Palestinian allies, including "supporters" in the west, want war with Israel even more than the Palestinians themselves want it. Btw: allies, not just idiots in the west, but allies like Russia, Iran, China and Qatar, each of them oppressive hellholes that massacre their own population. That alone should tell you that the Palestinians are the wrong side to support.
The eu did surveys in ghaza that showed that 60% support hamas and its islamo supremacist goals. They really want to kill those jews badly, the only thing they dislike about hamas is that it is not winning.
Support for Hamas has generally been in the mid-30s, but that is also skewed by the fact that Hamas also provides things like health care and food for poor. But why do you think it matters? Israeli support for the genocide in Gaza is more than double that. Should we destroy 80% of civilian Israeli infrastructure, starve the population and stop baby formula from getting into the country, have the worlds most moral snipers shoot Israeli children, and then set up a faux humanitarian organisation that shoots at hungry people?
Or more to the point, why do we always judge Israel and Palestine with 2 different measures? Either Israel as a people and as a country are innocent and "it's only the government", hence boycotts are immoral. XOR people and government are both the same and boycotting every Palestinian everywhere on the planet is normal. Oh and accept that half the people just attack/boycott/refuse to serve or sell anything to all muslims, not just Palestinians, focusing especially on kids and other weak muslims, "because of the situation in Israel". Perhaps even have crowds chanting "gas all muslims" near mosques. And, of course, any kind of public success for Muslims must be brutally attacked, people, spectators, business partners, ... [1] After all, par for the course for Jews ...
Not that anyone on the planet will be surprised that arguments only apply when making Jews evil, not to anyone else (more general any group we don't like, gypsies, the mentally ill, especially against mentally ill children, ...)
[1] https://www.algemeiner.com/2025/09/01/pro-palestinian-protes...