If one party wants control on the ground and the other will settle for footnotes in history books, maybe we have something Israel and Palestine agree on.
> Both Hezbollah and especially the Houthis did support Palestine, within their means, at significant cost to their own population
Both non-state actors. And Hezbollah backed down after being decimated. The Houthis are still going, but part of the ceasefire is giving oxygen to Israel to focus on long-range operations.
> it primarily fights Israel via its proxies so the actions of the proxies are also the actions of Iran
Yes. The proxies are neutered. Iran is strategically weaker than it’s been in decades. Hamas has gone from being a threat to a charity case, from fighting for things to trading lives for textbook references.
> they will derail normalization, which they achieved, and "exposing all the normalizers" which they also achieved
How? Part of the ceasefire is continued normalisation. If normalisation is rejected the ceasefire ceases and we go back to war.
> I were Russia or China, I would be extremely happy about that because the next time America or Europe lectures them about morality or international law, they can just laugh it off
Versus before? The last time the lectures worked was in the 90s. For anyone.
Tactically speaking, I’m halfway convinced the folks who came up with Defund The Police and think everyone supports Mangione have architected the pro-Palestinian movement in the West. It started as a solid expression of sympathy. But it’s developed into another project of name calling, genericising terms like genocide (if everyone is committing genocide, it’s not something you can punish), and labelling barely-symbolic wins as monumental historical reconfigurations. (An Al Jazeera op-ed predicts Israel’s downfall. Next thing you know, Mika Brzezinski will be predicting a Democrat resurgence and the Daily Caller a GOP single government.)
All this has done is polarise and strengthen opposition to the Palestinian cause by falsely making it seem the Palestinians are as nutty as the pro-Palestinian protesters. (Meanwhile, on the center left, it looks disturbingly like people who have no knowledge of the ground truth again trying to draw borders in the Middle East from abroad.)
Going into a discussion to lecture never works; if there is no curiosity or capacity to question, it’s not an exercise in activism. It’s a child running away to the end of the block, taking satisfaction in the imagined panic and regrets of their parents who likely never noticed their absence in the first place. The current state of rhetoric from both sides points to one outcome: an increasingly-irrelevant Gaza and lots of dead for people to write sympathetic history books about.