Israeli soldiers are fighting because they think that, if they don't, their friends and families will be killed. They might be right or wrong - but that's why they are fighting.
Unarmed women and children are not that dangerous, they must have range of thoughts when killing those. Some regret, some glee, some disgust, some joy I would imagine. I wouldn't put the relief of saving their own in the top 10 though.
As for the Palestinian side of things, I'm sure its not simple too. Some would do it for revenge, some would do it for some ideological BS, some would do it for religious reasons. The terror attack they initiated on the 7th of October has quite a bit of footage and its very clear that they did not intend to survive the action. They were obviously doing it for "greater good", so to speak, without an expectation to personally gain anything by killing civilian Israelis.
Very few will see direct gain from this conflict.
Firstly, the majority of the IDF isn't active-duty conscripts, they're reservists. They're still conscripts, and they still have to serve, but it's not exactly difficult to not serve if you choose not to. Not sure this impacts anything else you say, but I thought it's worth mentioning.
> I don't believe the premise that Israeli soldiers were concerned for the lives of their loved ones and killed that many civilians and ar OK with it.
Almost all IDF soldiers are incredibly regretful that any civilians have to be killed. This is true of most armies most of the time, btw, not specifically Israeli soldiers.
But they are absolutely fighting for the fate of their homeland. They might be wrong - but most Israelis believe that Hamas cannot be allowed to continue, because they have promised, multiple times, that they will repeat the October 7th attack again and again. They are literally an hour's drive from many people's homes. Two hours and they can reach the majority of Israel.
Almost every Israeli knows someone, either directly or via one other person, that was killed or taken hostage. Without trying to hard, I can think of about 5 people I know who lost a loved one.
In that way, this isn't similar to something like Iraq or Afghanistan, where for the most part, American soldiers were fighting a real, but vague, threat, which posed almost no immediate danger to anyone they knew.
> Unarmed women and children are not that dangerous, they must have range of thoughts when killing those. Some regret, some glee, some disgust, some joy I would imagine. I wouldn't put the relief of saving their own in the top 10 though.
Unarmed women and children are not targeted intentionally. There's great regret that anyone is killed, and probably majority happiness that the person targeted is killed, usually someone who is directly responsible for deaths.
There's also a lot of mistakes, because it's war, and because Hamas tries hard to cause these mistakes to happen. It's sad, unfortunate, and I doubt anyone feels "glee" or "joy" that civilians ever are killed. I'm sure there's a few psycopaths like in any large group of people, but the IDF tries to weed these people out.
Yes, it is. I think almost all of those deaths are on Hamas, they brought this on their own citizens that they are effectively keeping hostage. But that doesn't make me regret it any less.
> They won't be known as the "good guys", even if the Prime minister tries to frame this as a fight between good and evil most of the world isn't buying it.
Israelis haven't been seen as the "good guys" at any point in my life, really, most people in the world have either been indifferent to Israel or hated us.
(For the record, I don't see many Americans being treated as evil in the same way, despite having caused far, far more casualties than Israel has ever done in the last 20 years.)
It's really a sad situation because there's a lot to admire about Israel and its people. They were able to build a progressive and prosperous society in a desert but unfortunately turned into genocidal oppressors. Hamas being Hamas doesn't make this right. Unless Israel manage to exterminate every single Palestinian, they will end up with people that remember what Israel did to them. You should be able to draw conclusions from your experience of a single attack that took lives of thousands Israeli and extrapolate to what those people are going through over the years and this latest fight and think about what will want to do to you and what they think about you.
I'm well aware. And for sure much of the Muslim world hates the US as much as Israel ("Big Satan to Israel's Little Satan").
That said, mass demonstrations against Israel started on October 7th, before any Israeli response, and while invaders were still within Israel. In Western countries. Can you imagine anything like that happening on September 11th?
> It's really a sad situation because there's a lot to admire about Israel and its people. They were able to build a progressive and prosperous society in a desert but unfortunately turned into genocidal oppressors.
I think it's a sad situation because so many people are dying. This would've been just as sad if Israel hadn't done much.
The said, I highly disagree with your characterization of Israel as "genocidal". That's just not true. There is no intention to cause a genocide against the Palestinians.
> You should be able to draw conclusions from your experience of a single attack that took lives of thousands Israeli and extrapolate to what those people are going through over the years and this latest fight and think about what will want to do to you and what they think about you.
I think it is incredibly sad to think that Palestinians cannot find a way to live in peace, or that Israelis can't. Somehow Germany and Japan suffered far worse in WW2 but this didn't cause an endless cycle of violence against the Allies. Why can't the same be true here?
As for what I want to do to "them" - if you mean Hamas, I'd want to take apart the organization. If we can capture every single member of Hamas, I'd be all for it. If not, we need to kill as many of them as we have to to stop the organization.
If we could do that without a single innocent Gazan dying, we should. No war can be conducted in this way though, and Hamas is making that even harder to do by embedding themselves in civilian areas. I sure as hell don't want any "revenge" that comes at the cost of innocent Gazans, and neither do most people.
Btw, you call this a "single attack". It wasn't, it was an invasion that lasted two days, and a bombing campaign that is ongoing for three months. Including the daily worry of other countries joining and attacking Israel.