The President’s role is largely ceremonial. The President consults party leaders to determine who they would support, then nominates that person. The nominee must then form a coalition that can get support from a majority of the Knesset.

How do you think intelligence agencies work? There is a reason why background investigations for security clearences focus so much on “is there anything you can be blackmailed with”

It was not compulsory for Ben Gvir, who was excused from compulsory service because the IDF at the tine thought he was too extreme. He has since been convicted of terrorism, and currently serves as Israel’s minister of defense.

The problem with Israel is that its leader was a bit too vile. About half of the elected knesset refused to form a coalition government with Netenyahu, resulting in years of failing to form a governing coalition.

Eventually, the path out of the stalemate ended up being forming a coalition with far right members of the knesset that had previously been political pariahs; including appointing a convicted terrorist to the role of minister of national security.

Prior to October 7, this was an extremely tenous political position. The coalition was hanging on by a thread. The attempted judicial coup reform was stopped by massive public backlash. And the politian whose divisiveness was central to the political crises that enabled the far right to join the coalition was in the middle of defending himself in a criminal trial. However, when a crisis like October 7 happens, you are stuck with the leaders you have. And Israeli leadership at the time was possibly the worst in the history of the country for handling it (unless you agree with their manifest destiny version of Zionism, in which case I think they are doing quite well).

When you are looking at someone down the scope of a gun, you do not see a kidnapper, or a mudered. You see a person. That is not a moral judgment. It is a deep instinctual inpulse we have, enhanced by a lifetime of socialization, against killing people. Half of the point of military training is getting people to overcome tharmt base instinct.

As the commanders say, these soldiers have not had adequate training.

We are talking about US politics here, so I’m assuming the focus is what the US has been doing.

Stop funding and supplying arms to Israel.

Like the $20 billion we approved earlier this month (in direct violation of the foreign assistance act)

recognize Palestine as a state

We simply do not do this. Then again we don’t recognize Taiwan either.

Back ICJ arrest ruling for Netenyahu

The US has been opposed to this warrent, and there is talk of sanctioning the ICJ over it.

Should anyone ever arrest any Israeli official pursuant to an ICJ ruling, there is standing US law (American Service-Members’ Protection Act, otherwise known as the invade the Hague act) authorizing the President to use full military force to secure their release [0]

Urge the UN to sanction Israel

The US is routinely the sole veto on every major UN vote on Israel.

[0] This isn’t Israel specific. It us authorized for bassically any ally that is not an ICJ member.

Neutral and Israel alligned countries have been calling for a humanatarian pause on purely humanitarian grounds. Even if you don’t care about the hostages, that Hamas was willing to offer them means that they had an interest in such a pause as well; making Israel the only obstacle to it happening. That is to say, the severity of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is squarly on Israel’s shoulders. The most charitable reading of the situation is that they have determined that the tactical advantage of blocking a humanitarian pause outways the civilian lives they put at risk by doing so.

Admit that the project of establishing a democratic Jewish state has failed, and try to salvage a democratic state out of the rubble.

The UK is not supporting Hamas, so their is no point in protesting their support for Hamas. If you want to fly to Iran and protest their support of Hamas, that would make sense.

Beyond just ‘not ok’, Israel’s response is playing out exactly how the terrorist’s playbook says the terrorized country should respond: terrorist launches a terrorist attack, terrorized country responds with forced, civilians hit in the crossfire blame the terrorized country and move towards the terrorists.

In the past few days, we have been hering Israeli officials refer to this as their 9/11. What they do not seem to appreciate with their comparison is that the emotion ladden responce the US engaged in after 9/11 proved to be one of the greatest military blunders in the countries history.

If they want to learn a lesson from 9/11, they should address the immediate military threat, fix the security and intelligence failures that allowed the attack to be so successful (such as diverting soldiers away from the Gaza border; and (allegedly) ignoring warnings that Hamas was planning an attack). Once the immediate concerns are addressed, they should back off and allow time for cooler heads to think through what a strategically effective response would look like and implement that.

Unfortunately, such a response is politically difficult in the best of circumstances. Given that the current ruling coalition is almost the definition of hotter heads, built itself up on the promise of “security”, and was already on shaky ground domestically, I don’t think they have many options other than a rash response.

Hopefully they constrain themselves to just responding in Gaza. If they decide to respond by going after Hamas’s supporters in, say Iran, we are looking at a major regional war.

Israel and Palestine are both countries. Private ownership does not factor into the equation. If you get into the weeds, part of the dispute is a claim of private property rights that predate Israel. But even that duspute could be viewed through the lense of collective rights.

There is only one country whose national religion is Judaism, but it is practiced in plenty of other places.

More to the point, the fact that there are other Islamic countries is of little comfort to the Palestinians. They do not live in those countries and those countries do not want them.

Some of those countries do provide varying levels of support for Hamas because they (accurately) see it as an indirect way to attack Israel.

By the same token, any blame you want to place on Israel for this conflict reflects on Isreal as whole, and not every individual living within it.