Altherion

This is true, but it hardly supports your case. Yes, that region has been the site of countless conflicts for thousands of years and has changed hands many, many times so there are many, many competing claims upon that land and it's important to many different groups for religious and cultural reasons. In 1947, there was a unique attempt to have the world as a whole (in the form of the then-new United Nations) split it up peacefully. The Jews accepted this, but the Palestinians and Arab nations rejected it and went right back to violence which has only paused ever since.

The reason to attack Rafah is not to rescue the hostages (though the Israelis will of course use it as leverage for a deal), it's to destroy the remaining heavy weapons and rockets in possession of Hamas as well as the tunnels used to transport contraband and other military infrastructure. It's true that doing what is necessary to truly destroy Hamas and prevent anything of the sort from ever rising again is beyond what most Israelis would tolerate and definitely beyond what the US would let them do, but Israel can dramatically degrade the capacity of Hamas (or any successor group) for waging war. Rafah is the last place in Gaza where the Palestinians can launch rockets from: Once Israel cleans it out, the rockets will finally stop. And yes, this is only a temporary solution, but it will take the Palestinians years to rebuild their rocket arsenal and the rest of their military capability.

It's possible. However, I think it is more likely that referring to a terrorist group as a "liberatory organization" will be cause for banning instead.

No can do. There's no genocide and we're already involved in more foreign conflicts than we'd like.

Well yes, if Israel could change the past, then of course there are many, many things they could do differently. For that matter, so could the Palestinians and the Arab states (who have started most of the fights in that region). However, this line of thinking is utterly worthless when it comes to dealing with the present -- the past cannot be changed and while we can learn from it, decisions must be made based purely on what is possible right now.

This is true, but it dramatically understates what Hamas has done. The issue is not so much that Hamas started it, it's that Hamas has crafted its military strategy around the assorted international laws with the fundamental idea being the usage of human shields for military objectives. Here's an article that goes into this in more detail: Of course, the people who wrote the international laws weren't stupid and they foresaw that somebody would try to do something like this. If you read those laws carefully, they have exceptions for protected facilities being used as military bases. In a more perfect world, people would look at those exceptions, see what Hamas has done and give Israel the benefit of the doubt... but because of a combination of antisemitism, political pressure from the Muslim nations, the natural aversion to seeing civilians die and the fact that it's a whole lot easier to pressure Israel than it is to pressure Hamas, a substantial fraction of Westerners as well as most international institutions immediately disparage Israel for any and all civilian casualties. This is not to say that Israel is completely blameless. Everyone makes mistakes and in a war those mistakes will often cost lives. It's also true that some individual soldiers and commanders are, in all likelihood, deliberately killing civilians and getting away with it (this happens in very nearly any non-trivial war). However, by far the lion's share of the civilian casualties is due entirely to Hamas's strategy and there's nothing Israel can do about it short of letting Hamas get away with what they've done and rewarding them for taking hostages.

These international courts are rather like a pack of diseased, toothless dogs: they bark loudly, but have no bite.

There was definitely bipartisan outrage in the US regarding the ICC decision, but now it looks like they might actually work on something to be done about it:

I think it's the other way around. In the most successful British colonies (the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.), the native peoples were so devastated that what is happening now in New Caledonia is simply not possible.

No, but the status quo is a baseline and they might deliberately go above that.

It's an ambiguous curse for Netanyahu because while it does indeed restrict his international travel, it also appears to significantly strengthen his position at home (at least some of his rivals have rallied around him). The other possibly worrisome consequence of this decision is that to look strong and demonstrate to the world that they don't care about the ICC, the Israelis might be tempted to do something unpleasant...

No, because I very much doubt any meaningful number of Israelis buys into such Hamas propaganda. I do think that a substantial fraction (probably even a majority) is not averse to the people of Gaza suffering some privation as part of the war.

I don't think this is at all surprising. Recall what happened in the US in the wake of 9/11 or, going further back, in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Nations actively at war tend to not care all that much about enemy civilians. In this specific case, this is somewhat amplified because the group of people that has traditionally been further on the left is precisely the group that was directly hit by the attacks that started the war. Most likely, if the war ends and there are no further provocations, the animosity will slowly revert to the mean. Furthermore, even at at its peak, I don't think it is enough to get the far right significantly further than they've gotten by now.

Thank you for the article -- it is an interesting piece. However, I don't think it affects Ben-Gvir's chances. The settlers certainly support him, but they are controversial even within Israel and they are relatively few. Everyone else there knows his story and while he has made his way into the cabinet, it's very hard to see how he gets more powerful from here on (not impossible, but it would require further cataclysmic events).

His position is actually fairly similar to that of Marjorie Taylor Greene: they are extremists who play an outsized role due the governments of their countries being very nearly balanced and their willingness to say outrageous things. The good news about that situation is that the moment the moderates make some semblance of a deal or there is a new election after which the majority is not quite so fragile, the extremists will be cast out (to some extent, this already happened with MTG).