Palestine

The two are not in equal positions when it comes to keeping "cool heads". Pretty hard to keep cool when you've grown up being shot at and starved and driven from your home. It's easy to sit in a safe place and condemn someone else's reaction to having their home conquered and their people slaughtered, but it's another thing entirely to actually go through it.

Of course, targeting civilians and committing war crimes is bad. No contest. But people are going to fight like cornered animals when you try to genocide them. Let's not pretend like Hamas came out of nowhere.

People are a product of their environment, and people who grow up while being exterminated become radical and violent. The way to stop that from happening is not to keep dropping bombs and blocking humanitarian aid and sniping children.

Hamas proposed a full prisoner swap as early as Oct 8th, and agreed to the US proposed UN Permanent Ceasefire Resolution. Additionally, Hamas has already agreed to no longer govern the Gaza Strip, as long as Palestinians receive liberation and a unified government can take place.

• https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-07-23/rivals-hamas-and-fatah-sign-a-declaration-to-form-a-future-government-as-war-rages-in-gaza

On the other hand, Israel has been preventing any peace solution for decades by it's settlements in the West Bank, assassinated/jailed more moderate Palestinian leaders, and is completely open about it's plan of ethnic cleansing the entire Gaza Strip and lack of interest in any peace plan.

Both Hamas and Fatah have agreed to a Two-State solution based on the 1967 borders for decades. Oslo and Camp David were used by Israel to continue settlements in the West Bank and maintain an Apartheid, while preventing any actual Two-State solution

• (Oslo Accord Sources: MEE, NYT, Haaretz, AJ).

The settlements represent land-grabbing, and land-grabbing and peace-making don’t go together, it is one or the other. By its actions, if not always in its rhetoric, Israel has opted for land-grabbing and as we speak Israel is expanding settlements. So, Israel has been systematically destroying the basis for a viable Palestinian state and this is the declared objective of the Likud and Netanyahu who used to pretend to accept a two-state solution. In the lead up to the last election, he said there will be no Palestinian state on his watch. The expansion of settlements and the wall mean that there cannot be a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity. The most that the Palestinians can hope for is Bantustans, a series of enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli military bases

• How Avi Shlaim moved from two-state solution to one-state solution

Others on the One-state reality:

‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe

One State Solution, Foreign Affairs