"Protection" being the operative word of evergreen disagreement. I still think the odds are that Israeli intel knew about Oct. 7 and buried it, because "protection", to some, might mean sacrificing a thousand people if it justifies a violent response that will, yes, undoubtedly do a lot of protecting. For one beautiful moment of my life, I almost half-believed that U.S. support of Ukraine portended a principled U.S. geopolitik that aligned with my values, and wasn't one opportunistic fuck-up after the other. Nah I'm just kidding.
That presupposes that October 7 was somehow good for Likud. The fact of the matter is, Netanyahu's entire political career has been aligned along "I will keep you safe from Hamas" and he didn't.
We'll see. They just admitted publicly the goal is indefinite military control with "buffer zones" of stolen Palestinian land. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/23/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news More so than staying safe from Hamas, this seems like Netanyahu's real goal and that of a lot of people that voted for him. Certainly this war hasn't made people more leftist over there.
Dude they've been admitting publicly that Palestinians gotta go for seventy fucking years. They've been doing that one murder, one humiliation, one annexation at a time the whole time until they were given an excuse to glass Gaza and here we are. But they WERE given an excuse and it just gets uglier from there. 'cuz yeah. I watched Bush's approval rating go from 50% to 90% in One Fucking Day. Here's a candlelight vigil for victims of September 11 in Tehran.
That sucked ! And like, is my point. We should not have bombed so many people after 9/11. Yet we did. And now we're letting Israel do the same thing for a lot of the same reasons and it's like we've learned nothing.