Or...you could stop calling EVERYBODY who doesn't unquestioningly agree with your views on this conflict "Jew-haters". It's an unjustifiable slander of at least 90%-95% of those who oppose Netanyahu's increasingly pointless invasion of Gaza- a place where nobody who was under voting age in 2008 and certainly no one who wasn't born then is responsible for Hamas coming to power and nobody who isn't a member of Hamas bears any responsibility for what was done on October 7th.

I condemn what Hamas did that day, and agree that the hostages should be released- positions the vast majority of the Palestinian solidarity movement in North America now takes.

But it is legitimate to say that there are some things October 7th doesn't justify:

It doesn't justify killing ANY Palestinian children.

It doesn't justify killing huge numbers of starving people just for peacefully running towards stopped aid convoys out of desperation to get food before their children starve.

It doesn't justify destroying MOST of the hospitals in Gaza and forcing doctors there to perform surgery, including amputations of limbs, without anesthetic.

And it can never justify telling people to move to what they are told will be safe zones, then launching ground attacks and bombing raids on the safe zones.

We now know Netanyahu's invasion can never free the hostages- that it may actually cause there deaths and I hope you will agree that nothing positive can ever come of Netanyahu turning them into a human sacrifice for the Zionist project- and that it will never "crush Hamas", so why carry this any further?

30,000 dead- half of them innocent children- is vengeance enough for 1,000 Israeli lives.

And we know that peace can't come without Israel accepting a Palestinian state and that to get to that, there has to be a compromise agreement between Israel and Palestine in which both sides keep their dignity and no one is forced to lose face and be seen as the defeated party in the conflict. There will be no chance of ever getting that if Netanyahu gets his way and stages an unnecessary massacre in Rafah, or if he takes this where he really wants to and forces all Palestinians to choose between permanent exile, or staying in permanent powerless subjugation to the IDF in their homeland in Palestine.

There cab be peace, a two-state peace- we both know there can never be peace if Palestinians get no state at all- but it requires things that can never happen if Netanyahu is allowed to do all that he wants:

Both communities being recognized as having equally deep roots in these lands, that neither has the right to treat the other as inherently malevolent, bigoted, or evil towards their community;

That both communities must be recognized as having equally valid historical trauma, having valid claims to having experienced injustices at the hands of the international community and each other's respective leaderships, and equally valid reasons to distrust the other side's leaderships;

That the broad mass of ordinary people in each community, regardless of the actions of their respectful leadership, can be assumed to be decent, humane, and not responsible for the actions of the leadetship(s);

That, when the conflict is ended with a face-saving compromise in which no side is humiliated, both communities need a guarantee that they will be guaranteed peace, safety and freedom, that neither will ever again be faced with the prospect of dispossession or subjugation again- and that a massive, internationally-funded program of rebuilding and reconciliation between the two communities in two adjoining countries;

That the concepts of "defeat" and "victory"- concepts which belong to a pre-nuclear world that hasn't existed since August, 1945, and a type of warfare that ended forever with the dropping of the atomic bomb- are not only outdated and unachievable, but dangerously arrogant and self-indulgent, and must be abandoned by us all- especially in a world where no war since 1945 has been a fight between unambiguous good and undiluted evil, and no war ever will be again.

I write this, as much as anything else, out of the opposite of "Jew-hatred"' out of the deep sense that what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza isn't n protecting Jews either in
Israel or in the Diaspora, but intentionally putting them all in greater and greater danger. I not only don't want any more Palestinians to die, I don't want anyone else e who is Jewish to die in a war, just as I don't want anyone else to.

It is unlikely that Netanyahu wants to prevent any more Jewish deaths. If he did, he would not be doing any if what he is doing now. He seems prepared to sacrifice the entire Jewish world in the name of exalting his ego and st as staying in power. Why trust him, when he clearly doesn't care how many people in his own country he gets killed, when he clearly doesn't ever want the Israel/Palestine conflict to end?