Jimmy Carter has died

I have been pretty reasonable with you, and many times taken what you said and thought about them considerably. You need to also come to this with good faith.

Things like

> I agree that there's a list of supposed reasons, but I think they're being considerably blown out of proportion

Are not in good faith, imo. People whose loved ones die, who see killing in the name of hatred, on both sides, are not blowing their issues out of proportion. The expansion of settlements isn't a "blown out of proportion" reason to doubt Israeli commitment to peace any more than terrorism is a reason to doubt Palestinian commitment to peace. Both lead to horrific and disturbing killings and massacres with state (or quasi-state) backing.

When you say

> it's not even close to being true that they got nothing from it. Those accords literally created the Palestinian Authority, which is the official governing body of the Palestinians

You're not reading what I'm writing with good faith, you're preparing a counter. I didn't say nothing. I said "basically nothing" because a government can be formed without Israeli agreement. They did not see an end to settlements. They did not see Israel commit to stopping its authority over Palestine, instead they rather cemented it against a "state" they knew had no equivalent defense against such. This is all after they made very big concessions and continued to do so even after the talks failed.

And you know that. You clearly know as much as I do if not more, which is why it's hard to accept what you're saying as being with genuine intent.

> the later negotiations ended with the Palestinians walking away from deals that gave them almost everything they supposedly wanted

You can't possibly believe this. Every side had to compromise quite a lot. Israel had to give in to some right of return, and Palestine had to give in to having to tell some refugees they would never return to their ancestral lands. Palestinians had to accept a broken up West Bank despite the occupation and settlement of the area being illegal, and they were willing to do so. You know the talks were not Israel giving everything the Palestinians wanted to them and them refusing over minor details. Why would the stronger nation, negotiating with their strongest ally orchestrating the talks, do that? The UK did not end up giving the IRA even 50% of what they wanted to resolve that conflict.

> The American left-wing reading of the situation is simply wrong

Why is it wrong? Israel is a security threat to Palestinians right now and for the past many years. If you are a Palestinian, especially led by a government who pursued peace with Israel (the PA), you are at risk to have had your land taken by settlers, your family killed by the same settlers, and your home stolen and "legalized" by Israel after it's stolen. That is entirely why Hamas grew in power against them because they, like the Israeli far-right, pointed to real security concerns and offered no compromise with their enemies as an alternative to solve those. It of course does not work. Hamas did not stop Israel from being a security threat, nor did the Israeli far right stop Palestinians from being a security threat to Israelis.

> if the Palestinians had the capacity to actually eliminate Israel in a day (as Israel has towards the Palestinians) - Israel would simply be destroyed. I'm as sure of that as I am of anything.

You have constantly spent time trying to paint Palestinians as fundamentally evil (but earlier you decried anyone doing that to you), but you're missing the point that what would happen in hypothetical scenarios, and what Palestinians "want" doesn't matter. It doesn't change the reality on the ground, and it doesn't change the fact that when two hostile nations are next to each other, only deterrence can lead to peace.

> Any analysis of the situation that doesn't take into account that the Palestinians getting what they want means the destruction of Israel and likely death of all Israelis - not taking that into account is simply choosing to ignore reality.

Never has there ever been any peace process that even hinted that the Palestinians would get "what they want" according to you (because according to you it's the death of all Israelis), so it's a moot point to bring up. What if we asked what the Israelis want according to polling? Lots of polling shows that they believe Palestinians should be stateless forever or be deported to other countries. But again, that has never been offered in any peace process ever.

Stick to reality and what's actually on the table politically, and try to answer in good faith.

Sure. I would say, I just think there is a big difference between implementing a series of treaties (correctly denigrated at the time) like Clinton and trying to solve a catastrophic situation like Carter.

But also the highest potential for mass disaster. Even the so-called "safe" designs like pebble bed reactors have had issues with dust from the pebbles grinding against each other.

> A generation ago, Israel was working towards a two-state solution.

Yes, very briefly, until Netanyahu’s faction murdered Yitzhak Rabin, and not since.

> I think even in 2017, a majority of Israelis supported a two-state solution in polls.

There is a very big difference between a majority of a population preferring something in polls and the government representing that population working toward it (cf., universal single-payer healthcare in the US ca. 2000)

> And btw, this whole notion of "the Palestinians are fighting back" is itself detached from reality

No, actual Palestinians are, in fact, fighting back.

> the Palestinians are ostensibly represented by the Palestinians Authority

“ostebsnsibly” is a marker that the speaker believes the claim following it is detached from reality; if you can't even claim that this is more than ostensibly true, how can any claim about what the PA is doing rebut a claim about Palestinians qua Palestinians are doing?

> that's their official governing body

Yes, it is the widely (but not by the US or Israel) recognized government of the State of Palestine. It doesn't particularly represent the Palestinian people because of the Hamas-PA civil war that Israel orchestrated and assisted Hamas in winning in Gaza, and Israel’s subsequent use of its power administering parts of the West Bank to prevent all-Palestine elections for a new PA government that have been agreed to between the PA and Hamas; most living Palestinians couldn't vote in the last Palestinian election, most Gazans (before the recent escalation in fighting, even moreso probably since) weren't born.

> Hamas overthrew that governing body

No, they threw them out of Gaza, where Hamas already dominated the local administrations and the representation to the PA.

> The actual government of the Palestinians is working together with Israel to stop terrorist attacks

No, Israel has also engaged in an escalation of violence in both the PA and Israeli-administered parts of the West Bank, against the wishes of the PA. The PA acknowledges that it is structurally incapable of militarily fighting Israel (the PA administered parts of the West Bank lack the geographical compactness of Hamas-administered Gaza, and are instead dozens of small cantons interespersed with similar Israeli-administered zones and even when (almost) adjacent separared by Israeli-controlled security corridors, but is still actively opposing Israeli actions with every means at their disposal, having repeatedly suspended security cooperation even though the US has used the leverage its aid gives it over the PA to demand uninterrupted security cooperation, and securing a UNGA resolution demanding Israeli exit from the entirety of the occupied territories (Gaza and the West Bank) following its success at the ICJ in having the occupation declared to be in violation of international law.

From my cursory sense of things it seems like both are probably true. The U.S with FDR obviously contributed to it ending when it did, but so did other countries who were there earlier and sacrificed more. The U.S seems like more of a winner in the sense that they sacrificed relatively little while getting the most out of it, but I don't know if that's a good use of the term "won" in the context of a world war.