Between the destruction of Twitter as a platform of consequence and my good fortune that most of my Facebook contacts are sane (and I can mute the others for 30 days at a time), I haven't seen much of the disinformation and propaganda about the Hamas pogrom and Israeli response that others have reported on. But I have read some good commentary that recognizes the context of the current conflict, particularly that its outlines haven't changed one bit in at least 3,000 years.
Before I highlight some of the commentary I found useful, even if I didn't agree with it completely, I should remind everyone that Israel has a right to exist. After the Romans expelled Jews from what is now Israel, Jews have been persecuted and killed simply for being Jews in every country they've lived in, including the United States. I don't think any other ethnic group has lived with that kind of threat for as long and in as many places, ever. So, after Nazis killed 6 million Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, the United Nations agreed to turn over the historically Jewish lands inside the former British colony of Mandatory Palestine to the administration Jews as the modern Jewish state of Israel—the name the land had before the Roman occupation 2,100 years ago. The million or so non-Jewish people already living there—alongside the million or so Jews who lived there before European refugees started settling post-WWII—had a choice: live inside the democratic state of Israel, with all the rights and privileges of Israeli citizens but under Jewish government, or leave. Many left.
Of course it's not that cut-and-dried, and there is ample evidence that Israeli militias forcibly expelled some of them. But the creation of Israel, and the departure of Palestinians from the new country, gave Israel's neighbors a single goal: the destruction of Israel. Since 1948, governments and militias in the region have openly advocated wiping Israel from the map and killing all the Jews in it. Imagine if every US State south of Canada wanted to destroy New Jersey—and on several occasions have tried—and you can start to consider what living in Israel feels like.
So last week, a group with an explicitly genocidal charter and who have ruled an area the size of Detroit through terror launched a pogrom against unarmed civilians for the purpose of undoing the normalization of relations between Israel and the aforementioned neighbors. The disorganization and incompetence of Israel's government under Netanyahu gave them the opening, and the illegal settlements and armed incursions onto Palestinian land by right-wing religious nutters with the passive acquiescence of Netanyahu's coalition partners gave them the excuse. Of course, they don't need an excuse; they just want to kill all the Jews.
I believe the Israeli government under Netanyahu needs to end, and the next government needs to remove the illegal settlements in the West Bank to allow Palestinians to form a real state with real borders and a real government. But there's no moral equivalent between land theft and killing babies.
I'll have more on this later, along with links to some of the saner commentaries I've read in the past week. Clearly one center-left moderate American won't have the answers to this 3,000-year-old problem, but I hope at least I'm looking for the right questions.