What I told my kids
You’ll hear that it’s not as simple as the Israelis are good guys and Palestinians are bad guys, or vice versa. And that’s true.
But it’s also not so complicated that there are no clearly identifiable good guys or bad guys. It’s just that they cut across the sides.
The good guys are anyone, on either side, whose ideal end state is two countries, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace.
The bad guys are anyone, on either side, whose ideal end state is the other side being, if not outright exterminated, then expelled from its current main population centers (ones where it’s been for several generations or more) and forcibly resettled someplace far away.
(And those whose ideal end state is everyone living together with no border — possibly as part of the general abolition of nation-states? They’re not bad guys; they can plead insanity.)
Hamas are bad guys. They fire rockets indiscriminately at population centers, hoping to kill as many civilians as they can. (Unfortunately for them and fortunately for Israel, they’re not great at that, and also they’re aiming at a target that’s world-historically good at defending itself.)
The IDF, whatever else you say about it, sends evacuation warnings to civilians before it strikes the missile centers that are embedded where they live. Even if Hamas could aim its missiles, the idea of it extending the same courtesy to Israeli civilians is black comedy.
Netanyahu is not as bad as Hamas, because he has the power to kill millions of Palestinians and yet kills only hundreds … whereas if Hamas had the power to kill all Jews, it told the world in its charter that it would immediately do so, and it’s acted consistently with its word.
(An aside: I’m convinced that Hamas has the most top-heavy management structure of any organization in the world. Every day, Israel takes out another dozen of its most senior, highest-level commanders, apparently leaving hundreds more. How many senior commanders do they have? Do they have even a single junior commander?)
Anyway, not being as bad as Hamas is an extremely low bar, and Netanyahu is a thoroughly bad guy. He’s corrupt and power-mad. Like Trump, he winks at his side’s monstrous extremists without taking moral responsibility for them. And if it were ever possible to believe that he wanted two countries as the ideal end state, it hasn’t been possible to believe that for at least a decade.
Netanyahu and Hamas are allies, not enemies. Both now blatantly, obviously rely on the other to stay in power, to demonstrate their worldview and thereby beat their internal adversaries.
Whenever you see anyone opine about this conflict, on Facebook or Twitter or in an op-ed or anywhere else, keep your focus relentlessly on the question of what that person wants, of what they’d do if they had unlimited power. If they’re a Zionist who talks about how “there’s no such place as Palestine,” how it’s a newly invented political construct: OK then, does that mean they’d relocate the 5 million self-described Palestinians to Jordan? Or where? If, on the other side, someone keeps talking about the “Zionist occupation,” always leaving it strategically unspecified whether they mean just the West Bank and parts of East Jerusalem or also Tel Aviv and Haifa, if they talk about the Nakba (catastrophe) of Israel’s creation in 1947 … OK then, what’s to be done with the 7 million Jews now living there? Should they go back to the European countries that murdered their families, or the Arab countries that expelled them? Should the US take them all? Out with it!
Don’t let them dodge the question. Don’t let them change the subject to something they’d much rather talk about, like the details of the other side’s latest outrage. Those details always seem so important, and yet everyone’s stance on every specific outrage is like 80% predictable if you know their desired end state. So just keep asking directly about their desired end state.
If, like me, you favor two countries living in peace, then you need never fear anyone asking you the same thing. You can then shout your desired end state from the rooftops, leaving unsettled only the admittedly-difficult “engineering problem” of how to get there. Crucially, whatever their disagreements or rivalries, everyone trying to solve the same engineering problem is in a certain sense part of the same team. At least, there’s rarely any reason to kill someone trying to solve the same problem that you are.
“What is this person’s ideal end state?” Just keep asking that and there’s a limit to how wrong you can ever be about this. You can still make factual mistakes, but it’s then almost impossible to make a moral mistake.