Gaza is a minefield. Let’s leave aside for a moment whose fault that is. (Hint: everyone’s.) The present fact that we all, especially Gazan civilians, must contend with is that it’s a dense urban area intricately filled with tunnels, explosives, launch pads, rocket fuel, you name it, all of which has a single purpose and that is to kill civilians. So who thinks two million civilians should live in a minefield? Well, turns out nearly everyone who cares to weigh in on the subject! Every Arab nation, nearly every Palestinian official, and bizarrely, perversely, most of my supposed friends on the Western left. On the other hand, who thinks it would be a good idea to evacuate Gazan civilians from this minefield? Seemingly only Israelis. Now I see it’s fashionable to call this ethnic cleansing, but that only makes sense if you’re thinking like a settler. Settlers being the only Israelis who’ve found encouragement in this festival of horrors, something that fits their Gog and Magog territory narrative. The populist Arab street is also rejuvenated, relating to Palestinian civilians like pawns in an epic chess narrative of Jewish versus Muslim territory. Likewise you all on the Western left are on a raging relapse high of this "from the river to the sea" poison, because you're desperately addicted to your own narrative, and your own projected white guilt, about colonialism.

Life or death is not the plot-line that grabs you. In even the most inflammatory Elders of Zionism conspiracy theory, the story Hamas police tell Gazan civilians when they confiscate their cars to prevent them evacuating from Gaza City, the IDF is not trying to kill 2 million Gazans. If it meant to then it surely would have by now. No, their idea of the most evil Zionist plot is the very same “ethnic cleansing” story being copy-pasted into a thousand progressive fundraising emails: the occupiers are using a humanitarian crisis to push Gazans from their land. Evacuation is impossible, displacement is immoral.

In fact the occupiers – who evacuated ourselves from Gaza nearly 20 years ago – stopped sending fuel and power because they're being used to bombard our homes. (By the way, why is everything in Gaza impossible for lack of resources, except for launching tens of thousands of rockets?) No one but the settler fringe actually wants to re-occupy Gaza. But even if it's a fiction, why does the idea of a land grab offend you more than the very real possibility of another botched rocket launch torching another hospital? Why are you more incensed by Gazan displacement than by Gazans’ own government methodically turning the city into a minefield and then hiding hundreds of hostages under it as if to deliberately induce the carnage of urban warfare?

Maybe because you think more like settlers than you think like me. Me? All that I and the overwhelming majority of Israelis want is for the rockets to stop falling from all directions, and then some modicum of security that no one will go door to door again in our neighborhoods slaughtering us in the most gothic cruelty yet seen in human history. Which might mean, in practical terms, sweeping the minefield.

Now would you rather the minefield be swept with or without civilians standing in the middle of it? Settler logic, Hamas logic, seemingly your logic, says the highest value is territory, never mind the cost in lives. Therefore the most urgent need is to restore Gaza's status quo ante, preserving the minefield with the rockets and their human shields side by side, and every future horror that portends. This is what "immediate ceasefire" means. When you say this is primarily a story about “ethnic cleansing” and “occupation” what you are talking about is territory. You’re either on a different step of Maslow’s hierarchy than we are, where basic survival isn’t a worry so you can worry about territory instead, or you’re on a fucked-up carnival-mirror Maslow’s hierarchy where territory comes before my and most Gazans’ basic survival.

Nearly every major Jewish population in Israel arrived in an evacuation from somewhere. Jews have already lost so many homes, the ideological fixation of settlers on specific territory feels to most of us like an aberration, sickeningly contrary to Jewish priorities. But it seems our friends on the left are similarly fixated, similarly sick.

So maybe stop thinking like the settlers. Maybe stop thinking like Hamas. Maybe stop making all our lives a big game of Risk, like (dare I say it) Western colonialists. Maybe at least consider evacuating the minefield first, sweep it, and then we can talk about the next ceasefire that will hold until it doesn’t and the displaced on both sides can go live somewhere anyway and maybe have a chance of growing old.