God, wouldn't that be nice!

Wouldn't it be nice if Israel were willing to distinguish between the ~3000 terrorists who attack on Oct 7th and the ~40,000 Palestininans they've killed, the 100,000+ they're crippled, and the ~2 million they\ve made homeless?

Wouldn't it be nice if, in every conversation I have on this issue, I didn't have to repeatedly remind people that the Palestinian people are not Hamas, they are not "Radical Islamists," they are innocent people living with the decisions that Hamas made.

And god, I wish I could remove the word “perfect” from every Zionist’s vocabulary on this issue. I even made a reference to this in the article. Would you be satisfied if I said that Hamas’ conduct on October 7th wasn’t “perfect”? Or if I argued that their original charter’s stated aim to kill all Jews isn’t “perfect”?

Conditions in Gaza were appalling. Here's Ariel Sharon, prime minister during the Gaza withdrawal, describing the conditions:

"We cannot hold on to Gaza forever. More than a million Palestinians live there and double their number with each generation. They live in uniquely crowded conditions in refugee camps, in poverty and despair, in hotbeds of rising hatred with no hope on the horizon."

See how much more honest this is than "not perfect"?

Israel imposed the blockade in 2007, shortly after Hamas won the election. But conditions were still terrible in Gaza before that.

Israel removed 8,000 settlers from Gaza during the disengagement (for almost entirely self-serving reasons) and moved over 15,000 settlers into the West Bank the same year. The Palestinians continued fighting because Gaza wasn’t some kind of wonderful gift from which they could build a state, it was an overcrowded refugee camp that was thrown at them to halt the peace process and justify the continued theft of the West Bank.