I was just reading about how a current Israeli war minister’s son died in combat and it made me wonder that if Israeli’s politicians who make these decisions know their family will be affected by it personally and directly, does that lend towards the suggestion that it is more likely they are making genuinely ethically and morally correct decisions to engage in war stuff given their personal skin i the game?
It would seem totally different from American politicians like Cheney who create bullshit geopolitical conflicts knowing full well their progeny will never be touched by it…
Edit: I’m assuming they actually care/give a shit about their offspring and family, even if only just for appearences
How do most Israelis feel about the West Bank or are they aware of it?
Is the West Bank the foundational issue/disagreement?
Every Israeli is aware of the West Bank (it’s a huge chunk of land right at the center of the country, kinda hard not to be aware of it).
Almost nobody in Israel seriously considers “returning” the jewish parts of the WB, the are de-facto annexed.
I’d say Israelis are more concerned about Gaza than the WB.
Is that because Gaza is proving harder to annex and pacify than the WB?
Gaza was controlled and settled by Isrealis. In 2005 Israel, by mean of law and force, disengaged from the gaza strip unilaterally. In the process, relocated all the settlers. I don’t think there’s any will, national or political, to annex gaza, not realistically.
I will admit that I am not totally aware of the value of the land of the West Bank vs Gaza. But from what I’ve been reading and watching these few months on the history of the conflict, it seems that at some point the PLO stopped being violent after the second Infatada and Hamas took over Gaza and pushed them out to the West Bank. And ever since then the West Bank has been slowly carved up more and more by Jewish settlements, effectively making the Palestinian land in the WB never able to be contiguous, and thus making it impossible for there to be a Palestinian state to be formed there.
So if the WB land is valuable to the Israelis, I cannot see how Gaza wouldn’t be even more valuable. As Gaza has access to the sea, and there’s all the recently found offshore gas fields that would fall into Gaza’s EEZ if it ever were to be recognized as the Palestinian state.
So I don’t get why they’d disengage and leave Gaza alone when it’s valuable land, but they will also for obvious reasons never stop the blockade of Gaza. As an outsider that leans to the left, it seems like Gaza is purposefully put into the state that it’s in, to keep a threat around, so the conservatives running Israel can stay in power.
Israel just wants peace, and will settle for stability.
Gaza is a pain point on both fronts.