1) As long as Israel treats Palestinians the way they current do, there will always be another Hamas. That or completely remove Palestinians from the area, which seems to be the current goal. So no, completely destroying hamas is not the only way to get to a real permanent peace.
2) How Israel is going about things is the exact issue at hand. You can't just hand wave it away.
3) Let's say for the sake of argument destroying Hamas IS the only way to achieve long lasting peace, how much death and destruction does it justify? 10% of the population? 20%? 50%?. So again just because it's an armed conflict, doesn't mean anything goes.
> As long as Israel treats Palestinians the way they current do, there will always be another Hamas
Eh, Trump's peace deal isn't great for Palestinians. But it gives them peace and a path to more peace in the future, and paths where considering options for resistance other than terrorism may flourish.
> Let's say for the sake of argument destroying Hamas IS the only way to achieve long lasting peace, how much death and destruction does it justify? 10% of the population?
Yikes. Based on precedent, I don't think countries have typically put an upper bound on this figure. I think a better question might be what's the upper bound on civilian deaths that should not be required to be exceeded if Hamas has to be routed out by force.
History there has shown that other types of resistance don't work very well. Just need to look at the west bank. No Hamas, no rockets being lobbed into Israel and yes peace as long as the people there put up with their land being taken over arbitrarily, being beaten or killed at some frequency and just in general being treated as a lower tier of humans.
yeap. lets look at west bank. there is so much hamas in west bank that there are areas that PA doesn't go to. Last/this year PA tried to clean it up [0] but failed and asked Israel to help
There are occasional attempts at shooting rockets from west bank. Rocket workshop was found two week ago in Ramallah [1]. The only reason that we don't see 20,000 rockets from west bank like from gaza, it's presence of Israeli army and security services there.
> History there has shown that other types of resistance don't work very well
“Paths other than terrorism” doesn’t mean non violence. It October 7th had been limited to military bases, the hostages IDF soldiers, this would be a very different conflict.
If Hamas attacked a military target on Oct 7th, killed 1000+ IDF personnel and took a few hundred more hostage, you don't think Israel will be bombing Gaza today? There isn't a way to prove either way, but I'm highly doubtful. I think the demands would still be the same; "return the hostages or we'll keep bombing you".
> If Hamas attacked a military target on Oct 7th, killed 1000+ IDF personnel and took a few hundred more hostage, you don't think Israel will be bombing Gaza today?
Oh, they'd absolutely be at war. But I don't think they'd have the freedom to collectively punish as they do now. There would also be a credible argument for Hamas remaining in power, possibly armed, after the peace.
> It October 7th had been limited to military bases, the hostages IDF soldiers, this would be a very different conflict.
The same thing happened when Hamas attacked an IDF post and captured a soldier, Gilad Shalit. There were multiple invasions by Israel, including "Cast Lead" which was described by the UN Fact Finding Mission as "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability."
> Replace Palestinians with Black South Africans, and imagine this offer was made in 1990 to the ANC
Black South Africans weren't de facto surrendering in a militarised conflict.
The ANC resorted to small-scale terrorism [1]. (It didn't work.) If the ANC had launched an October 7th scale attack, not only would it have derailed the international pressure that ended Apartheid, but in the likely ensuing civil war, yes, one side would have probably been forced to unconditionally surrender.
The practical options on the table are war and peace. If you're losing this badly, you take peace. Then you litigate over war crimes, et cetera. Gaza has no seat at the table because there is currently nobody to take the seat, that's what peace gives them. (I'd be shocked if Gazans, in a plebescite, rejected this deal. The only people who win by continuing this are Hamas and Likud.)
> But that didn't help and would have derailed the international pressure that did end Apartheid if it had escalated into a single attack with a thousand casualties.
Let’s stick to the facts instead of coming up with conclusions out of thin air.
And your understanding is wrong: the ANC gained freedom for South Africans because of its decision to resort to violence. Mandela and the ANC did not make this decision lightly, but it was a decision of last resort. The same applies to other African independence movements.
> Gaza has no seat at the table because there is currently nobody to take the seat, that's what peace gives them.
They have no seat at the table because: a) they saw what a “seat” resulted in (Oslo and then limbo) and b) the response to their democratically gained “seat” was a coup by Fatah backed by the US and Israel.
> the ANC gained freedom for South Africans because of its decision to resort to violence
This is a genuinely ambiguous question--I respect your position. What we can agree to is there were no large-scale terrorist attacks leading up to the negotations that ended Apartheid. (The Boipatong massacre almost did, and that was forty something casualties.)
> the response to their democratically gained “seat” was a coup by Fatah backed by the US and Israel
This is entirely accurate. It's also a fact that Hamas proceeded to never hold an election again. (Which isn't grounds for ignoring them. October 7th is.)
Hamas can't credibly represent Gaza. It continues to call for the destruction of Israel. It's shown a complete lack of concern for its own civilians. And it has no evidence of a popular mandate.
Gazans need a seat at the table. They can only get that through peace.
1) As long as Israel treats Palestinians the way they current do, there will always be another Hamas. That or completely remove Palestinians from the area, which seems to be the current goal. So no, completely destroying hamas is not the only way to get to a real permanent peace.
2) How Israel is going about things is the exact issue at hand. You can't just hand wave it away.
3) Let's say for the sake of argument destroying Hamas IS the only way to achieve long lasting peace, how much death and destruction does it justify? 10% of the population? 20%? 50%?. So again just because it's an armed conflict, doesn't mean anything goes.