My aim was not to provoke, but keep the conversation straight.

Why are you saying this? Why wouldn't you want to provoke? You don't condemn Hamas for the viciousness of its attack, you "whatabout" your way through the organization's atrocities, you cherry-pick lies told about Hamas, as if their own body cams didn't reveal their barbarous acts (which are independent of and sully if not vitiate the righteousness of their cause), and now you say you don't want to provoke, as if that would be untoward?

Explanations are not justifications. Hamas is the product of Israel's existence in the same way that the Nazis were the product of Versailles. The sad fact is that bad acts create bad counteractions. To say that the emergence of a blood-thirsty Hamas is a "natural" consequence of history is not to deny that Hamas is blood-thirsty. There were better ways the Palestinians could have dealt with defeat by the West in 1948. They have wasted seventy-five years trying to un-lose a war.

Even if they get their land back, what will they have? The Russians overthrew the Tsars, and look what they got. Why would anyone expect the medieval minds of Hamas to make life any better than, say, the Taliban? Does Hamas recognize Jews as human beings? Does Hamas even recognize Palestinians as human beings, as opposed to human shieldings?

I am willing to accept the idea that Israel was a bad solution to a bad problem, that the idea of an ethnostate (like any place that calls itself the "Islamic Republic of" wherever) is an obsolete concept. I am even willing to say that no "place" has "right to exist," given that just about every place is occupied by conquerors. But I also say that October 7 was a day of atrocities, that many of the hostages are being brutalized, and, in general, that the Arab response to the creation of Israel reflects the same cultural ineptness that made the creation of Israel possible.