should america support Israel?

[Thumpalumpacus]

So you're basically saying this can only end with total annihilation of one side - Palestinians are incapable of learning any lesson even in the case that one million of them die needlessly in a war they can't realitically win. So be it.

No. The gist of my post was that your comparison was inapt due to differing circumstances. I made no prescriptions of any sort.

Any extrapolation that can be made would most sensibly take into account their cultural history and memory. If you devastate a people without offering a hand up then you should not expect them to turn into friends. Neither Japan nor Germany turned into peace-loving nations because of their defeats. They turned into peacful nations because our aid allowed them to recover enough to see that peace is a better economic solution in the long run. Additionally, both Germany and Japan had previously been organized nations of disciplined workers, rather than a group of malfortunates crammed into a small sliver of land and bereft of unified leadership. Both Germany and Japan still had effective (though weakened) organs of government in place through which the Allies could administer the citizenry. Gaza has not that advantage; the polity is divided, and so long as one segment stays extremist, Israel will likely be reluctant to extend ny aid. That means that after a devasting defeat, the Palestinians will be politically divided, economically barren, and angry.

Were Israel to kill the million or so Palestinians as you suggest, without subsequently aiding the survivors, the devastation would only worsen the conditions which are driving the extremism in the first place.

That doesn't sound like a good recipe for peace, to me.


Any generalizations about Palestinians as an ethnicity have nothing to do with my post, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't impute such fallacious thinking to me any more. Thanks.