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So remove the leaders of both sides.

Lol not true. Palestine disarmed in the Westbank and got nothing except brutal apartheid and evictions as a result.

Hey, don't forget those of us who made this mess and walked away, and every country on Earth that continues to keep the whole Middle East area relevant through our continued oil addiction.

Nah, he might seem reasonable here but his foreign policy scatterbrain pattern is part of why Ukraine is in such dire straights now. Man hesitated to stand up to Russia when they went into crimea, the point when they could have been stopped, and where Ukraine could have been swept into the EU orbit with far less bloodshed.

We certainly are catering to the least intelligent among us in almost every respect. Oddly enough I was thinking about this earlier tonight.

I went to use the bathroom at a restaurant and they had some framed newspapers hanging up in there that were run by the local newspaper in 1918. The whole front page was news about WWI but it looked very different from war coverage in newspapers today. Each article was very detailed and covered distinct parts of the conflict during that week. There were sections on American, Canadian, and English troops detailing whether they had advanced or retreated, how much fighting they had to do, and references to commanding officers, obscure geographic landmarks, and lines from speeches made by foreign leaders. It was clear from the way they were written that the author expected his audience to be familiar with all of this to the point that he could mention them in passing without offering any explanation as to how they were related or what significance they held.

This is in stark contrast to current reporting on the Palestinian conflict and to a lesser degree the war in Ukraine. Journalists rarely mention details in such a way and when they do they offer much more context, assuming the reader is unfamiliar with much of what is being discussed. Of course, they're not wrong in that assessment but I do wonder how much of that has to do with the public being slowly conditioned to expect simplicity in reporting. These articles often read more like a political interpretation than a description of events. Nuance and the expectation of sustained interest in the subject seems almost entirely absent.

I think he's trying to get around the black and white viewpoints, and bring up the idea that Israel is committing war crimes here, which is outside the Overton window on the subject currently in US politics.

Nah, you can go through the comments here and find people taking the easy, position here too. "Bombing kids is bad, so Israel is bad, so Palestine must be good, therefore I support Palestine." No nuance, no attempts to look at a more complex situation or consider anything other than the most basic information.

Both sides suck, both sides will happily commit war crimes, and civilians on both sides are getting hurt. One side is getting more hurt than the other, but that's just a difference in capability, not belief.

It's the official policy of many of the most powerful nations of the world that only Palestine sucks here and that Israel can do no wrong and must be supported unconditionally. An "everyone sucks here" position would be much closer to the truth.

Honestly, this is nonsense.

They aren't fighting over Jerusalem or Bethlehem or Jericho. This is a war over grazing lands and a beach town.

If you look away from Gaza for a moment to the other Palestinian territory -- the occupied West Bank -- you'll see gangs of a hooligans in pickup trucks with ski masks smashing water wells and killing cattle in small desert towns like it's high noon at the O.K. Corral.

The whole religious component is largely a distraction. There are people living on real estate that other people who have much bigger guns want. The solution is the same as it's always been: give folks a fair deal.

It's not a coincidence that this latest conflict is in Gaza. Gaza isn't religiously significant. It's just the densest, most brutal concentration camp in Israel. This is not over religion.

This feels a bit like saying "you know, the trail of tears was bad, but we don't bring up the complex issues of Cherokee slavery".

Sharia law isn't a monolithic belief and is subject to reform. But it's entirely a secondary consideration when you have a state committing genocide.