Quote Originally Posted by filghy2 View Post
It could equally be said that there is a fine line between being pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian, and that line has been crossed on many occasions.
I tend to think in terms of parallel lines characterising a lot of the conflict since the first Aliyah in 1880. The settlers were astounded to find Arabs living and working where they expected a half-empty undeveloped land. Zionist/Nationalist pamphlets continued to peddle this lie right up to the 1940s. The two communities thereafter failed to accommodate each other, much as in the late Ottoman era the existing Jewish communities had lived as far apart from the Arabs as possible. There have been examples of co-operation, friendship, inter-marriage, but the post-war settlement that evolved from 1917 to 1921 robbed both the Arab and Jewish residents of Palestine an independent voice: just as then they would have had to find a way to live together, so this remains true today.

The left has never spoken with a united voice, but I don't think any political movement has. We have seen in the UK how some radical Trans activists have alienated people they need for support with aggressive, intolerant views, I often just ignore it on the basis that most people most of the time are reasonable and respond well to coherent arguments stated plainly, rather than at ten decibels at one end of a megaphone -it is one of the reasons why Trump never won and can never win the popular vote in the US, and why it is counter-productive to denounce people with contrary views as 'Transphobic' or worse. There are other ways to peel an onion, one doesn't need an axe.

If the left has a problem, so too do those who support Israel, but can't or will not distinguish between Israelis in general, and the Fascists like Netanyahu, unwilling it seems to me, to accept the Fascist past that was part of the Israel project from the start, of people like Avraham Stern or Menachem Begin. It is thus possible to be a fierce critic of Netanyahu and the other minority parties in his coalition on the basis of their politics and political history without getting into an existential doom-loop about the life and death of Israel. Extremist politics might be a consequence of the extreme positions taken by both sides, with violence its most obvious form of expression, and right now the HAMAS attack of October '23 has badly damaged relations. That kind of violence forces people to take sides, and thus open a rift between them. It will take a long time for these wounds to heal.

Once upon a time they did try to put it behind themselves, and for all the flaws in the 1993 Treaty, it offered a framework for change. Itamar Rabinovich once wrote a book, via Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, about an earlier phase of 'peace talks' that went nowhere. The irony is that after the peace talks that did go somewhere, the choice not to take that road was made by the people who murdered Yitzhak Rabin, or people like Ariel Sharon, Netanyahu and Likud, and though Avi Shlaim does point out that the other major group to reject that Treaty was HAMAS, the main weight of his criticism is on Israel-

". The main conclusion is that the Oslo accord was not doomed to failure from the start: it failed because Israel, under the leadership of the Likud, reneged on its side of the deal."
The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process (ox.ac.uk)

Netanyahu's days in politics may be numbered, but like the men he admires from Israel's past, he is going down fighting, and I don't think he cares how many he he takes with him. Why should any reasonable person support him and his Nationalist politics, given that it has failed so badly over so many decades and has left Gaza in ruins, and set back the cause of peace for another dismal decade?