This is a fantastic opinion piece by Sanders that lays it out the situation before the Hamas attack, the current situation, and what should be done. He lays out several requirements for peace that aid to Israel should be contingent on. He also notes that Hamas is hurting the Palestinians, which is a detail very few mention.
He’s also one of the first people I’ve seen try to take a stab at what a lasting solution needs to be – two states, Netanyahu ousted, Hamas destroyed, foundations of Palestinian civil government created.
We can’t have a world where the only political issue is “Which psychotic fascists are worse than the others?” But avoiding that requires recognizing that Netanyahu and Hamas are both psychotic fascists who willingly throw “their people’s” lives away in pursuit of power and image.
Hamas keeps Palestinians imprisoned and deprived to use them as human shields to make Israel look bad. They steal food and fuel, maintaining Palestinians in a state of deprivation in order to point to them and say “Look what Jews did!” They burrow terrorist headquarters under homes and hospitals so that there’s no way to stop the terrorism without causing massive collateral damage, so Hamas can say “Look what Jews did!”
Netanyahu explicitly permitted Hamas’s attack on October 7, allowing Israelis to be raped, tortured, and killed because it would make Palestinians look bad. He lets Hamas do horrible things because it lets him say “Look what Palestinians did!” He promotes illegal settlements in the West Bank to create conflict so that he can say “Look what Palestinians did!”
They’ve both gotta go. There is no peace without taking all the fascists and putting them into a very small box where they can only harm each other.
Bibi going to jail would be a great start
And yet here we are.