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There's a major party candidate in the race who is saying no such thing. She's been all over trying to play both sides of the issue.
You honestly believe that Kamala Harris doesn't want Iran to stop funding terrorist organizations?
Hamas put Israel in a position where it had NO CHOICE but to issue the curb-stomping. The Iranians aren't idiots so they should have understood that and accepted the outcome.
I agree, and I think that even many of the folks arguing in favor of a cease-fire would agree that some curb-stomping was required. Israel had to respond. The argument is that at some point, the continued curb-stomping becomes counter-productive.
As for the Iranians....they kind of did accept that outcome. Hamas was expecting Hezbollah to storm over the border and invade as well, and they didn't do that. They fired missiles, and then stopped. Hezbollah is Iran's lapdog. That's as close as you can get to Iran saying to Hamas, shut up and take your curb-stomping. It wasn't until the curb-stomping kept going and going and going and going, affecting more and more non-Hamas folks, that Iran actually did something directly.
I'm not so sure, especially in Gaza. These people teach their kids to hate Jews just like they teach them to breathe. If I'm Israel, I'm game planning what a proto-state of "Gaza" would look like and am having serious discussions with the Egyptians, Saudis and Jordanians about
But they're not in those discussions. That's the problem. While Iran stopping their support of the "Axis of Resistance" is a necessary condition to a peaceful end of the conflict, so too is Israel taking steps along the lines you describe above. Neither is a sufficient condition, but both are necessary. And Israel isn't doing that. There's an essential part of Netanyahu's coalition that will not accept a Palestinian state ever under any conditions. They believe that they can fight and fight and fight until they "kill the bully," to strain your analogy. You and I both know that in the real world, it's not a viable option to kill the schoolyard bully - if you can't get them to back down with measures short of murder, you're still worse off if you murder them. But that faction of Israeli politics doesn't believe that's the case.
Look, I'm sympathetic to the position you're espousing. I've said before that I don't necessarily buy the argument that using force to destroy a terrorist organization is a fruitless endeavor due to creating more terrorists. There is something to be gained even by replacing an experienced and effective terrorist organization with an inexperienced group of would-be terrorists with no experience, training, resources, or organization. But I don't discount the arguments being made on the other side as irrational, just because there also exist irrational people that make bad (but different) arguments.
