I've put off replying to this for a bit (11 days says the counter) because I have trouble figuring out how to engage with this respectfully. I think there are factual details here that it could be interesting to discuss, for example that neither the US nor Iran appear to have clear leadership in how they approach this war.

The MoU was clearly not popular in much of the US administration, and yet Trump signed it, and I think he did so as earnestly as he is capable of. As for Iran, the messaging from Mojtaba Khamenei's office were also critical of the MoU, saying that they approved it because it was the will of the parliament and apparently the public at large, but that they disagreed.

These circumstances of course make a deal like this fragile and it may have motivated people in charge of various aspects of upholding it, to instead provoke the other side in order to make it fall apart. I do not blame the USA alone for that.

Anyway, that's not the problem I'm having with this exchange. What gives me pause is this:

Yeah you’d have to be childishly naive to believe or at least act the part to claim that that is up for interpretation

regarding the idea that Hezbollah was not honoring the ceasefire, and this whether the use of preemptive strikes by Israel against Hezbollah were justified. I find that difficult to engage with, because I don't want to play along with the narrative that one side needs to be completely annihilated for the other to know peace.

Israel has a long history of this exact behavior. They have a decades-old pattern of "preemptive" strikes, where they claim to have intelligence or knowledge that they were going to be attacked, and just destroy a place with impunity. I think the naïve interpretation is that those claims are always accurate. It requires us to never question Israel's narrative, which is that they're the victim even when they strike first - they're just a "smart" victim because they didn't wait to be victimized. I don't think that disposition helps us understand the world we live in and it prevents any kind of peace from forming.

The facts are simple: there was a ceasefire agreement, and one side honored it while the other didn't. You can't claim to be justified in that, because you had a hunch the side that was honoring it was only doing so as some kind of trick. It doesn't work that way. We as outsiders can't play along with accepting that.

If there's no active military conflict between two countries and one strikes the other, we'd need overwhelming evidence to accept that the country that carried out the strike was justified in their actions. You can't just bomb infrastructure, bridges or even barracks/hangars out of nowhere and say "well they were looking at me shifty, I'm the victim, they started it." No. When you're the first, or the only one to use violence, then it is almost certainly you who are the aggressor.