Thanks, that helps! So, this is where I think we have somewhat different perspectives.

I agree that hurt people hurt people--that's a very pithy way to phrase it. If you want to trace it back to the first hurt from a comparatively unhurt person, it was the xenophobic violence that Jews received when they first started moving to "Beyrut", mostly legally (and certainly no more illegally than happens in the U.S. with "undocumented immigrants" now) and making major improvements to the livability of the area.

Since then it's been hurt people hurting each other back and forth, so at this point it hardly matters how it started. If it had started the other way--with Jewish violence rather than Islamic violence--it wouldn't have much impact at this point.

I don't think the "oppressed" framework maps very cleanly onto the Middle East where it's cycles of mutual antagonism; even if one party is (now) more powerful and abusive, the other has been at times unconscionably vicious (all the way through), so it's a lot more of a mess than a clear-cut case where one side started the problem and had all the power and the other could only find ways to survive and resist. (Israel isn't the only participant in such cycles, either--look at the whole Iran/Iraq thing.)

Anyway, the main area where my perspective differs, I think, is that I don't think it's quite correct to only see "wholesale slaughter of children" and assign all the blame to the slaughterer (especially since the phrasing doesn't quite capture the totality of the situation). There's enough blame to go around.

The IDF is deeply culpable, of course, for not insisting on a strategy that was better able to separate noncombatants from Hamas, despite Hamas' attempts to prevent that; and for not more deeply embracing the value of Palestinian lives. Netanyahu is deeply culpable for signing off on the completely inhumane, militarily useless, and vengeful "starve them" strategy. But Hamas is also deeply culpable, because they are on record in multiple places saying that they welcome martyrdom (including of children!--they don't say "we men will fight to the death but leave our children out of it") as a strategy to achieve their territorial ambitions. (They don't say it quite like that, but that's what it boils down to.)

And the international community is culpable, because as you say, you don't let the victims of crime choose the punishment. But the international community has not been there to appropriately punish or restrain Hamas. It's Israel or nobody; the international community never took up the responsibility in the first place, and abdicated most of what responsibility it had.

So yes, the IDF needs to do a lot better (and these days I think has been doing somewhat better), even in the face of an opponent who is trying to make them kill as many civilians as possible.

And of course, the IDF kills more civilians than necessary: partly policy, because the directive is to not care much, and partly because humans are humans and war is horrible and individuals feel pain and hate and inflict it not just on those who individually have wronged and hurt them but also on the whole group. Soldiers get desensitized to the death of the enemy, or to death and suffering at all. You get plenty of horror and cruelty to fill up TikTok.

War, as they say, is hell. Not just the violence and pain of hell, but it pushes you into moral hell too.

So, it's really bad, and yet from my perspective you come down way too hard on Israel, way too soft on Hamas, and the international community doesn't even get mentioned. It's not a situation where you can say: "children are dying! stop!" because Israeli children are explicitly at risk from Hamas all the time.

We kill your children until you can't take the pain anymore and leave, or you kill our children until everyone views you as a monster and you are forced to leave. That's Hamas' gambit. So far, it seems to be working pretty well. They're largely right, if they're to be believed. (I don't believe them, however--it's a lot easier to say you're a nation of martyrs than to live it.)

If you can't solve the Hamas gambit, the "don't kill children" argument doesn't really work.

Now, where Israel deserves the most immense heaping of blame is to not tackle that gambit by rejecting it. It's not easy at all: Hamas' alternatives are the obvious ones. But there were other, more expensive, more patient alternatives that were passed over.

In the grand scheme of human horribleness, even all the horrors you've seen on TikTok aren't, alas, that unprecedented. Not even in this decade. Tigray was awful, and isn't fully resolved yet. (Ukraine is bad but not this bad.) South Sudan is awful now. I can barely bare to read the (extremely incomplete) news about that. Inability to post to TikTok doesn't make suffering any less.

But while we should grieve for the victims and do what we can to prevent additional victims; and grieve also that the perpetrators were driven to such immorality (without absolving them); we can't let our grief drive us to demand non-solutions that will result in even more grief later. And though I think that risk is often overstated, it's not zero. And that is the part that you don't really seem to acknowledge, and where reasonable people can in the face of horror nonetheless have somewhat different perspectives about the path away from horror.