I support this proposal, more or less, and I like that you posted alternatives to the proposal that you dislike, but I downvoted for what I see as the painfully euphemistic description of the the October 7 attacks as "the October 7 breakout." That's about as good as talking about "special military operations" or "Israeli self-defense." Pointless violence on the part of Hamas, Israel, or anyone else not only need not be excused to support an equitable one-state solution, but in my opinion, is likely to move further away from it.

But if you rephrase that (I'm not telling you what to write; call it Operation Al-Aqsa Flood for all I care), I will be happy to upvote this otherwise good answer.

@Obie2.0: Different groups of people broke out, some organized militia units, some disorganized fighters, some apparently not even armed. Some attacked military targets; some tried taking hostages; some may have gone over wanting to make revenge killings; some wandered around. Some killed armed civilians as part of their activity, some killed unarmed civilians (settlers on Palestinian land, but still civilians), most killed nobody. Many hundreds of Israeli civilians were killed, however, even when we exclude friendly-fire shelling by IDF; and there were some cases of sexual violence as well.

Hamas did plan an attack, and it carried it out, even if other people took advantage of it to carry out their own attacks or even just try to escape. But if you want to edit it to "the breakout and associated attacks on October 7" or something like that as a compromise position, I will withdraw my downvote.

OK, that's good enough for me.

@Obie2.0: "Hamas did plan an attack, and it carried it out" <- Yes, but - the Hamas attack, to our knowledge, did not include intentional killing of civilians. Hamas leadership was certainly callous and irrespective of civilian life in planning and training for the operation, and is responsible for its military wing's killings.

Honestly, to me, the line between "go kill whomever you want" and "go attack these military targets, but if you kill whomever you want along the way, we won't reprimand or criticize you at all, and we will in fact say that you are brave heroes of the motherland" is dangerously thin. And yes, that applies to the Israeli military too. And that's assuming I really believe that either neither Hamas nor the IDF uses indiscriminate slaughter as a strategy in the first place, which I am frankly unsure of.

@Obie2.0: I was actually somewhat surprised at the similarity when listening to a Lebanese Hamas official answering a question on the civilian deaths on that day. "Well" he said, "yes, there were battlefield complications." (t3qudat maydaniya) - it just reminded me so much of the kind of rhetoric I'm used to hearing from IDF apologists. Still, the occupied and starved have partially-mitigating circumstances which the occupiers, swimming in Billions of US armament and not living on brackish water, do not.

@einpoklum Very slightly mitigating, perhaps. I am willing to extend some slight benefit of the doubt to an ordinary unaffiliated Palestinian who ends up in a lethal confrontation with an unarmed Israeli, where they don't know whether they are armed, it's night, they're confused and tired and hungry and not thinking straight.

Extender that same benefit of the doubt to Hamas soldiers? Yeah, no.

Dissidents always are best at seeing the flaws in their own society. You live in a society full of people who will justify anything the IDF does, so it's easy to see.

Perhaps the die-hard Palestinian Hamas opponents also have an easier time recognizing the atrocities of Hamas than those of the IDF.

Then again, perhaps not.

If I were a Gazan, I assume I would have little respect for human life in general. For me, human life is be a vale of tears with few prospects which are often typically ended arbitrarily by a bomb falling on your head; and if it spared you then it got your neighbors. On what basis would I be expected to uphold its sanctity? It's a bit like slave revolts in societies which used to have them, like the US south....

Yes, the slaves may kill people in their masters' manor; and that is immoral; but I would be very reluctant to pass judgement and legitimize punishment. The difference, though, is between individuals and large political movements and organizations.

In a sense, this happened because Hamas, and the other armed factions, were stunted in their imagination. It seems they had not conceived of the possibility that the roles would be flipped, if only for a few hours: That they would be the lords and masters of a stretch of land, with superior force of arms, dominating over an 'enemy' population whose life and death is in their hands. Which

probably also means they have not dared to presume that one day, they may be a governing faction in a unified Palestine, with those Hebrew civilians from the Gaza-enveloping settlements as their subjects, their charges, which they theoretically also serve as elected officials.

@einpoklum Just on " the occupied and starved have partially-mitigating circumstances which the occupiers ... do not" - As far as I'm aware Israel does drop leaflets warning of upcoming operations, this doesn't absolve them of the civilian deaths caused but its dishonest to attempt to imply Hamas is the only one trying to mitigate civilian deaths.