I have been reading this blog here since years - "Letters from Rungholt. Sleepless in Israel", which started around 2006. This is the blog of a German expat written in German, who married decades ago to Israel and is living there with her jewish husband and family of 5.
It is a mixture about what daily life in Israel is all about, but also reporting the impact of attacks or war on Israel. It gives also quite a good view about what the common - non orthodox - Israeli society might think. It also has quite the big link list, and always was more moderate and not too extreme in the points of views.
So it is the internal, daily common view from inside Israel on the whole situation, and much much more.
I have learned 4 important things from that blog:
1. you cannot separate religion from politics in Israel, it just doesn't work.
2. Most Israelis nowadays don't differentiate between Hamas and Palestinian civil population in Gaza any longer, because in their eyes this is impossible and quite evident that the vast majority of Palestines does support and embrace Hamas' actions. So they are pretty much frustrated about that many Western press still makes that separation between bad terrorist and good palestines as poor victims which have to do nothing with Hamas.
3. As long as there is Hamas, which by the way was created with help of Israel to weaken PLO/Fatah, with its current charta there will be no peace.
4. Many Israelis are of the opinion, that there is a common pattern which emerged during the decades of conflicts which they are tired about: first Israel gets some sympathy from the western world after something happened, but this will quickly shift in favor over to the Palestines, putting the major blame then on Israel alone, making demands only at Israel and not the Palestines any longer. So they think that Palestines always are viewed in the long run unfairly in a way too good way for what they did and what happened to Israel. For example, they do consider the BBC as way too Palestine friendly right now. Or in short: the Western world public always gives a shit about us in the long run, making us the bogeyman and pampering the Palestines, so we do give a shit about their opinion.
Schlaflos in Israel
rungholt.wordpress.com
She also wrote some paragraphs about how peace could be achieved in her opinion, here we go:
"I've been saying it for years. To resolve this conflict, several things must happen. The international community must warn Qatar and the Islamic Republic of Iran and put them in their place. UNRWA, this corrupt shop, must be dismantled, the flow of money must be tracked, and abuses must be uncovered. The hereditary refugee status of the Palestinians, this meaningless unique selling point, must be abolished, and the countries in which there are descendants of the refugees must be obliged to grant Palestinians equal rights.
And the Palestinians must finally start building a true civil society. A society that is not just a facade, as in the Gaza Strip, behind whose hotels and hospitals, shops and villas (yes, there were entire residential areas there) no longer hide terrorist tunnels and rocket factories. They need to start teaching their children math, English, literature and history - the real history, not their made-up narrative of land grabbing and oppression. They had the chance to do that in 2005 and missed it.
If the international community, which has supported the Palestinians with unimaginable sums of money without checking where the money is going (IDF has found whole packages of money in the tunnels), if this “community” owes the Palestinians anything, it is this: towards it insist that they become a productive, life-affirming, peaceful and cooperative population.
The two-state solution is not an instant gift for terrorism, but a long-term offer. Give us fifteen or twenty years without terror, without lies, with bilateral relations and cooperation based on Stef Wertheimer's model of joint industrial parks, with student exchanges and joint ecological projects. After such a period of cooperation rather than aggression, a two-state solution is a realistic goal.
But what it looks like today? Why should Israel expose itself to this danger? Hamas and Fatach have both repeatedly said that they do not want a two-state solution, but rather want to eradicate Israel and end October 7th. as a blueprint for future actions. If the international community simply ignores these statements and the daily terror in order to believe in a fantasy project, the peaceful, compromise-ready Palestinian who so badly wants to be a good neighbor - then we are left isolated. It's a shame, but then the world hasn't, still hasn't, seen what has been clear to us for years."
