Personally, I'd love to hear the experience you went through and your thoughts on the situation.
Alright, see how much effort it will be. I'll try to keep the power level to the minimum.
The big thing about the Israeli Palestinian conflict that people doesn't understand is that it's not really a conflict. It's more like dealing with angry Indians after the Europeans colonized the entirety of the USA (sadly without the crippling addiction to booze). Basically it's that the Palestinians don't get the memo that they lost and they just do an occasional attack against civilians to feel good about themselves, while Israelis don't think on the Palestinians until they act up. That extends to Muslims inside Israel that would rather it stayed a western style welfare country than the shithole the entire region is.
Growing up, the education and journalism in Israel tried to paint an idea of "if we only give the terrorists what they want, they'll leave us alone". This culminated in the
Oslo Accords that didn't help shit ending with the PM in charge getting assassinated and the media and education system canonizing him as a saint, as if his death stopped the peace process forever. As well as the
Israeli disengagement from Gaza that had the Israeli army and settlers being removed from Gaza (in the latter case, sometimes violently), this also didn't help shit and just ended with Gazans firing rockets at Israel for more than a decade by now. The only real achievement in any of those is killing the Israeli leftist political sphere since no one was buying their shit anymore.
Keep in mind the rockets never really stopped and any Israeli counter offensive is usually done after some specific red line was crossed and always end in a few weeks. The fact news media outside Israel never report on those doesn't mean they don't happen.
The rockets themselves never had a large body count, but things to keep in mind: 1. If someone fires a gun at your general vicinity, it's not something you really want to risk, especially if your family is within the range. 2. The low body count is a result of massive aount of money poured into defensive systems and a population who goes into shelters when the warning sirens come (which also case mass distress, especially to children and animals). 3. After every attack you can expect messages on WhatsApp with family and coworkers that everything is alright, the economy essentially stops for 15 minutes every attack.
Over the last few years, the Israeli government had a strategy of giving Hamas the keys to the Gaza strip and hoping that they'll realize it's better to turn it into an actual habitable area. This never happened and Hamas basically fortified the shit out of Gaza, but still the government deluded itself that Hamas was reasonable and decided to trust that they won't try shit, while focusing on Hezbollah up north. This didn't pan out very well. Israel's biggest issues militaristically were always over-confidence and postponing unpopular actions and hoping it won't come to it, and we payed the toll on October 7th.
The attack itself can be best compared to September 11 in terms of shock and outrage. For me the morning started with rocket attack sirens and calls from my parents that they don't manage to reach some of my relatives, later through the day we found by the news the scale of what happened, and found out that most of our relatives were okay, except one that later turned out to have been mutilated during the attack (I never asked what exactly happened to him).
The morning afterwards, I got the call to report for action and came for new gear and a gun I carried for the month afterwards (an M16, which is a pretty nice gun though I never got to shoot it). I was prepared to guard settlements but in the end I got a safer line of work.
I served with some people from the attacked areas and they had absolutely horrifying stories of locking themselves in their houses and finding out their friends and/or family are dead. As the shock of the first days of the war passed, we had a ton of support from the rest of the country - Homecooked meals, fast food deliveries, snacks and letters from children how we should keep ourselves safe. For all the internal strife that you can expect from putting Jews together, it can't be understated how much support there is when the situation becomes serious.
Nowadays the situation has calmed, and most of the country got back into the status quo. Though some families, including mine, will still take months to heal, if at all.
I kinda want to apologize for acting like a bitch during the war. My biggest issue with the reaction to the war was from the internet right wing that decided to support Hamas because... I don't even know. There is a weird idea that Muslim violence in the West will keep to only attacking Jews rather than ordinary White people, which I think is absolutely ridiculous and will turn out to be a bloodbath if there will be some big event and groups of Muslims will just massacre every non-Muslim they see (and the question if the local Euro police and army can even do anything against such a wave). But I hope it won't get to that point.
My thought on the world wide reaction to the war is mostly negative. I expected Euro/UK media to be their usual asshole selves and they delivered on that. I felt like the USA had Israel waste too much time before going into the Gaza strip, but I do appreciate their army presence and financial support that made this still ongoing war possible. The woke reaction didn't surprise me and I'm pretty sure I wrote a lot of times on this site that Jews are way down on the social justice pyramid than they realize.
My current attitude towards the war is just apathy. At the start I just wanted to firebomb Gaza and be done with it, in some way I still think it is the better way than risking our troops there. But by now most of the damage was done and I hope this will change Israeli military doctrine to be less of a pussy and be more proactive. It does amaze me how low comparatively is Gazan death toll to the amount of destruction delievered.
After the war I don't think that people will have energy to do another large scale protest and I hope the current government resigns (even if I think it's entirely the Army's fault) but time will tell.
Yeah, it came out as a pretty long effort post. But it is nice to get my experience and opinions into writing.
