Lauren, your entire response rests on the illusion that acknowledging complexity is an excuse to abandon principle. You keep insisting the situation is ugly, as if that ugliness justifies stripping away every norm of law, proportionality, or accountability. But atrocity isn’t self-justifying. It’s not evidence that “nothing better is possible”—it’s proof that what we’re doing is wrong.
No. I'm saying that you are oversimplifying it to the point you have no understanding of what's going on. And you are repeatedly throwing out basically random answers from your prayer book. Look at your paragraph above.
You make reference to "atrocity"--but there has been only one action in this war that would reasonably be describe as an atrocity: 10/7.
And of course it's not evidence that nothing better is possible, this isn't even a strawman. The reason I say nothing better is possible is that nobody has made any serious proposal of a better answer. I'm not talking about random voices on the internet (although most of what you have suggested falls into the random answers category), but the professionals. There are a lot of them out there, many are hostile to Israel. Why have they said nothing?
Consider the two most recent air crashes. Washington--within hours I saw a post that had a picture of the helicopter's flight path, pointed to a little zig and said "there's your problem right there." And laying out what is now the accepted answer for what happened: the helicopter pilot avoided the wrong airplane, never saw the one he hit because two objects heading to a collision see each other in a static position--thus, just another light amongst the gazillion lights of a city at night. India: again, within hours we had people pointing out the deployed RAT and the sound it makes, thus showing the plane had no thrust. More than a week before the press started saying that. Yet the Gaza war, nothing.
You say there’s no evidence that a better path exists. The burden isn’t to prove utopia—it’s to stop pretending that bulldozers, sieges, and collective punishment are a substitute for policy. You want to call it realism, but the only thing you’re “realistic” about is continuing to kill civilians.
Once again, faith based answer. And the Hamas playbook: "collective punishment". No, what we see in Gaza is simply war. Particularly horrible for the people because Hamas chooses to fight on in a situation any reasonable army would have surrendered. Very similar to the Japanese strategy at the end of WWII.
You cite Hamas tunnels like a budget spreadsheet justifies bombing neighborhoods. But even your math concedes the point: Gaza is a garrison state—yes. But that didn’t happen in a vacuum. You don’t spend decades isolating, blockading, and humiliating a people without producing the militant infrastructure you claim to be shocked by.
Hamas playbook once again.
Everything you describe happens because of Iranian money.
Look at Africa. Multiple places worse than Gaza--but no meaningful combat because nobody's funding combat. Do you even know where Western Sahara is? And do you know who their oppressor is? Both are Muslim, nothing to use as a weapon before the press, I have yet to stumble on any mention of it on the Internet. (Once you know what to look for you can find it, it's not secret, just not being paraded before the press.)
You say diplomacy won’t work because “one side won’t agree.” But the side you’re referring to—the side with no army, no state, no airspace, no freedom of movement—isn’t the one dictating terms. And pretending that Iran is the only relevant factor is just geopolitical reductionism designed to dodge responsibility.
This war is Islam (currently under the mantle of Iran) vs Israel. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PLO, Hezbollah, all are just masks.
You scoff at elections, ceasefires, or regional cooperation as naïve, but what’s more naïve than thinking endless force will produce anything but more resistance? If someone like you had written off diplomacy in Northern Ireland or apartheid South Africa, those conflicts would still be burning.
The problem is your answers assume the Palestinians are after peace.
Northern Ireland--ended when we got serious about stopping the money.
South Africa--worse than it ever was under the Apartheid regime. They most clearly stepped from the frying pan to the fire. They threw off a small white boot in favor of a giant black boot. Same thing happened in Zimbabwe. When we were there it wasn't unsafe (so long as you stayed away from the minefields), but the fact it was heading into the shitter was apparent without even leaving the airport. And around the world in general the most prized currency was the US$--but in Africa it was the South African Rand (whose symbol I do not recall.)
And your moral compass—frankly—is broken. You claim to “see the facts,” but you’ve erased the distinction between combatants and children, hospitals and bunkers, resistance and terrorism. You’ve turned casualty counts into accounting errors. That’s not clarity. That’s desensitization disguised as strategy.
I see the distinction, you do not. You consistently cite things which suggest a civilian nature as proof something is civilian. But reality is the other way around, the grey areas are military. You take fire from a building, it doesn't matter what the sign says, it's military.
Let’s be clear: the difference between us isn’t idealism versus realism. It’s conscience versus collapse. You’re defending the normalization of cruelty. I’m defending the principle that being attacked by monsters doesn’t turn you into one unless you let it.
No. I recognize the manipulation, you do not.
It's same as the MAGA sheep who keep bleating about the deficit--and don't say a peep about the fact The Felon intends to run it way up.
You’ve chosen a future where domination replaces peace, suspicion replaces evidence, and morality is conditional on whether a missile can find its target. I haven’t. That’s the real difference.
No. You have chosen a "world" where the problems magically disappear. You know you can't solve Iran so you pretend Gaza can be solved without solving Iran. I understand that Gaza is simply one of the horrors Iran has created.