Some people are so predictable.

Israeli startups endure missile attacks
My progressive friend out in Oregon finds the lament by an 18-year-old internet denizen who has launched his own startup in Tel Aviv less than understandable.
Good grief, isn’t there enough to go around?
Ok, I consider myself a reasonable person and to those who blame the Israelis for all the mess in the Middle East, I only ask one question: What is it you want them to do?
I am sorry, but I really don’t have a clue. I mean if you want them to trade the West Bank and Gaza as a nation for the Palestinians, then pray tell me why it is the Palestinians who don’t seem to want to accept that offer? I mean it has been offered to them several times, always to be rejected on one premise of another.
Now, I am not a rocket scientist, but it seems that a compromise is in order here (sort of like the one that was offered in 1947 but precipitated a war of extermination against the “Zionists” who were only looking for place without the imminent threat of extermination on land that they and their ancestors had lived on for millennia).
Now, I know that for some reason, which I don’t know and don’t think he does either, a Palestinian friend of his (who lived near where we grew up together) got himself assassinated by an Israeli operative who fled prosecution to Israel. This truly was a tragedy, although I expect that the Israeli operative felt he had a perfectly logical reason to put a bomb on the man’s doorstep. That is what happens when you are in a conflict and it seems to me that the “Palestinians” and the “Israelis” have been in that conflict all my life.
Granted, the Palestinians who have been cooped up in “refugee” camps (if you want to call them camps) for those 65 years have had a pretty rough go of it. They have been made a lot of promises over the years by their leadership and their Arab Muslim brethren which have only led to their suffering.
I don’t know the answer. I do know that one way to stop the attacks and counter-attacks is to stop the attacks in the first place. You don’t want to be bombed: then stop bombing the other guy. It works both ways. Unfortunately, it seems, at least to this observer in the US of A, that there are factions within the Palestinian national wannabees who just don’t want to accept a Jewish-Israeli presence in the region.
I think it is fine that the UN granted the Palestinians a nation status (albeit only as a non-voting observer), but in return the Palestinians should have expected some response (like the Israeli announcement that it is going to expand its settlements around Jerusalem and on the West Bank). I mean, do you really expect the Israelis to sit there and do nothing.
Jiminy Christmas, do you really expect those of the Jewish faith to just stand by and do nothing? They tried that once and about 6 million of them died in just Europe in a little more than six years – the direct result of a rather well-documented “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”
It would seem logical to me that the descendants of their survivors would be a little less likely to just sit back and let the equivalent of their entire population die again.
So, they have nuclear weapons? You got a problem with that? They haven’t used them yet, and I suspect that they won’t unless they are about to get overrun. Just a guess on my part, but I do understand the Masada complex of no surrender, no retreat.
Do you have a problem with them trying to keep rockets and bombs from being given to people who fully intend to use them, regardless of what agreement their political leaderships strike? Seems rational to me.
It also seems rational when you are outnumbered and surrounded, that you try to put together the biggest stick on the block (especially when your neighbors have spent 65 years trying to eliminate you).
(Arab-Israeli Military Balance)
The irony to me is that the Jordanians could have absorbed the West Bank at any time between 1947 and 1967 and I doubt there would have been much said about it. The same could be said with the Gaza Strip, by the Egyptians before 1967. But that didn’t happen. Why it didn’t happen, you need to ask the Jordanians and the Egyptians, but I suspect that it has something to do with their own internal politics and the fact that the West Bank Arabs and the Gaza Arabs aren’t of their tribe or something.
Still, it comes back to what is the solution? Obviously it has to be a two-state solution, unless you want the Jews to agree to commit suicide, which is not an option that I would ask of them.
If it is a two-state solution, then the Palestinians need to pony up a realistic alternative for a map that allows the Israelis not to exist but to survive and be viable; just as the Israelis need to pony up their version of said map.
Such a map needs to take the realities of what is on the ground today and not was there 65 years ago. Sorry, but what is past is past and we can’t go back there even if we wanted to do so.
Unfortunately, my progressive friend out West, bless his heart, probably doesn’t see it that way, nor, apparently, do the folks in the region. Wish they did, however, because it would save so many lives from being damaged and destroyed.
Still, would someone tell me rationally what they expect the Israelis to do? Not what they should have done before, but what should they do now?