This is an evasion, not an answer. Yes, of course you'd want peace. What would that peace look like?

How would you want this conflict resolved if you were one of the ~2 million Palestinians who have never done anything to harm Israel? What would you want to happen to your former home? What would you want Israel to do about the Israeli settlers who are still, as we speak, killing innocent Palestinians and driving them from their homes? What would you want to happen to the people who killed your family?

Resolving these questions is a pre-condition for peace, no?

And if you think it's Hamas who have been trying to goad Iran into a conflict, I'm not even sure what tell you. Who assassinated Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil? Who fired a rocket at the Iranian consulate in Syria (which is technically Iranian sovereign territory)? Did Hamas make Netanyahu do these things? Or is he deliberately stoking a wider conflict in the region hoping that the U.S. will save him when it goes sideways?

Netanyahu has been trying to convince the U.S. to do his dirty work in the Middle East for decades. He stood on the floor of Congress in 2002 and assured George Bush that, "if you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region."

Yeah, it didn't quite work out like that did it?

And by the way, who said, just last month, "We don’t want war ... We want to live in peace.... We don’t wish to be the cause of instability in the region."? That's right, the Iranian president.

Zionism is inherently violent. Because at its core is the idea that you have a God-given right to a piece of land that other people have been living on for generations. As Ze’ev Jabotinsky put it:

"We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached […] Zionist colonisation must either stop or else proceed regardless of the mood of the native population […]

That is our Arab policy; not what it should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not."

This mindset is fundamental to Zionism. And is at the root of every single drop of blood that's been shed since.

That's not to say that Palestinians haven't committed atrocities since then. It is not, in any way, a defence or justification of Hamas' actions on October 7th. But it is to say that absolutely none of it would have happened if not for this 76-year+ campaign to steal the Palestinians' land and homes "regardless of their mood."