Translated here: https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1718201487132885246
Viewed from the angle of the West, I think the message it needs to avoid isolating itself from the world is very unusual for Western media and important.
Quote:
"Westerners must open their eyes to the extent of the historical drama unfolding before us to find the right answers."
And
"This Palestinian question will not fade. And so we must address it and find an answer. This is where we need courage. The use of force is a dead end. The moral condemnation of what Hamas did - and there's no "but" in my words regarding the moral condemnation of this horror - must not prevent us from moving forward politically and diplomatically in an enlightened manner. The law of retaliation is a never-ending cycle."
Spend tons of money on iron dome to shoot down the rockets and hope that Hamas won't manage to conduct another massacre, even if "only" half the scope of October 7?
This mess features not one but two parties who currently reject the concept of a cease fire.
And then everyone who wants peace invests lots of money and expertise over a long time to build a modern, prosperous, stable Palestinian society, despite whatever setbacks, attacks, and sabotage occur from within and without.
The only way to have peace is to give people a better option than becoming terrorists.
The ICJ ruled that Hamas return the hostages unconditionally, but everyone knows that won't happen — Hamas is simply unaccountable. "Everyone who wants peace" can't even get the Red Cross access to the hostages, let alone get them returned. Vague calls for diplomacy with terrorist groups doesn't solve much, which is why people are asking you for specific solutions — it's easy to say Israel should stop fighting, but then: what should it do? How would you actually ensure it doesn't keep getting attacked, repeatedly, as Hamas continues to insist they plan to do?
1: Mosul alone had ~10,000 civilian casualties and that was less densely populated than Gaza City and didn't have tunnels: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/thousands-more-civilia...
And it similarly had about 1MM civilians displaced: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/world/middleeast/mosul-ir...
And that wasn't the end of the fight against ISIS!
All living Gazans were born after the 700s. The vast majority were born after 1948. Most were born after 1967.
Telling people that their very real problems may stem from the misbehavior of dead, long dead, and extremely long dead people, even if those people are their ancestors, doesn’t change the fact that actual living Gazans have very real problems.
Those groups exist, and see themselves as continuations of their predecessors. When October 7 happened, my cousin posted a picture of the Dome of the Rock with the caption that it was the first step in retaking Jerusalem. An aunt posted about the Ummah. They aren’t even Arabs—just wannabes. Zooming out, Arabs who are happy to bomb the shit out of fellow Arabs (like Saudi does to Yemen) lend political and monetary support to the idea of an undivided Palestine (from the river to the sea—without Israel), and to Hamas, because they cling to a notion of territorial integrity of the lands considered by their ancestors in the 700s. In 1947, the Arab League and leaders of the Arab states opposed the UN partition plan and went to war with Israel precisely because of that idea.
You can’t hope to understand what’s actually happening in the Middle East by viewing people as individuals. The grievance of the people of Gaza, as a group, isn’t just that their life sucks materially, which is something you could fix. That may be the case for some individuals, but that’s not the case for the group and what the group does collectively. The group’s grievance is that Israel exists on what should be Arab land from the river to the sea.