Israel does not have racial policies.
This is false, see the Nation-State Bill, as well as the conscription laws. I already referred to both, so you should have been aware.
You completely invented this, out of nothing, and you pretend this is "obvious".
Surely you must be aware that my interpretations of these laws are hardly unique, so claiming that I invented them out of nothing, truly puts you beyond all ability to reason with. If you were to merely argue that one interpretation was wrong, there would be room for debate, but you are simply in full denial if you refuse to admit the obvious truth that my interpretation is a common one that you can even find on the most mainstream of sites like Wikipedia.
No, much more diverse actually. Which you would have known if you knew anything about Israel beyond a bunch of fourth-party packaged woke slogans, but you don't, do you?
I never addressed which country is more diverse and it matters nothing to my argument, or yours. I think that hurling personal insults that make any form of sense works better than what you just did.
They do [have civil marriage]. Ask me how I know? That's how I got married.
Did you get a civil marriage within Israel or did you get married outside of Israel and then got your marriage legalized? Because the latter is the common escape route, but is not an actual civil marriage performed by Israel.
Or did you get a 'couplehood union,' which is not a marriage?
Again, you didn't even try.
I did read up on the law before responding. So you are telling falsehoods based on false assumptions. Why don't you stick to the facts, rather than make stuff up?
Syria is at war with Israel, and repeatedly refused to sign a peace treaty. When you start a war and lose it, that's what happens.
This is false. I know, because I live in a country that 'won' a war and then had to give back the land that was gained. The idea that you can always just take land if you have the ability to do so, is not supported by international law or historic precedent.
Also, the idea that it's justified and no big deal when you go to war just because a peace treaty hasn't been signed is just trying to win a debate on a technicality, but is strongly at odds with reality. Do you think that if North Korea would attack the South, Western nations would shrug their shoulders since the countries are technically still at war?
"Tired" is not as strong an argument as you may think it is.
It is tired when the claim of double standards is never applied consistently or logically.
Israel has been and continues to be attacked by Arabs - from Hamas to Iran to Husites to Hezbollah to others. All those people eventually find out the dear and grave costs of such actions.
And vice versa as well. Again, you are so biased that you fail to apply your arguments to both sides.
If the inequality consists of having less chance to be murdered by other Arabs, then I don't see it as a huge problem, and neither see the Israeli Arabs.
I think that this inequality increases the abuse of Arabs by the IDF, by removing people from the IDF whose innate racism (that we all have to some extent) cannot be as easily be used to justify abuse as non-Arabs.
Nobody "drew them together" to Gaza and they resist all efforts to relocate them anywhere
They are being driven together right now and there are Israeli laws that restrict their ability to migrate to Israel, in cases where Jews would be permitted to immigrate (a racial policy!).
But I guess that what you mean is that they resist effort to ethnically cleanse them.
And their population grows by 2% every year, which is faster than Israeli population (1.5% a year). That's some shitty cleansing.
I never claimed that Israel was (effective at) ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in the past. You keep making stuff up that I never said.
I say they do not exist, what existed in Gaza was completely autonomous self-rule by Gazans
So Gazans had autonomy over the sea exit and could freely get on a boat and travel away, with no interference by Israel, and boats from other nations could freely travel to Gaza with no interference?
And the only thing that was asked from them is to please stop trying to murder us.
Resistance against an oppressor is legitimate. Of course, violence against civilians is not, but you've already demonstrated that you have no concern for that, given that you refuse to condemn Israeli violence against civilians.
And it is a lie that the only thing that was asked of them was not to murder Israelis. What was asked was to accept permanent oppression. Of course you can live in your alternative reality where Palestinians resist because they just want to drink Jewish blood, not because of a desire for freedom, but I think that it is telling that you never argue that Israeli's would accept it peacefully if they would have to live like you think is suitable for the Palestinians. Because of course they wouldn't, as they already demonstrated when they chose terrorism in the early days before the actual founding of Israel, even though they had it far better than the Palestinians already.
Not "all", but 80 to 90 percent. Look up any poll on support of Hamas.
The idea that people who support an organisation are 100% in agreement with the goals of that organisation is the kind of strawmanning that seems out of place here. It is commonly used in politics to accuse supporters of a politician or cause of being guilty or whatever they supposedly support. However, what they supposedly support differs per accuser, which makes it clear that it is just a straw man and not true. It being untrue completely undermines your reasoning.
Secondly, your figures seem to be wrong: https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/997
Ultimately, I don't care much for the current hateful feelings among Palestinians or Israelis, because if you actually want peace, you cannot take these as a given anyway, but have to change them. The only alternative is ethnic cleansing or worse. But it is not realistic to suggest a peace based on Israel's boot forever stomping on the Palestinians face.
Aapje58
2mo ago
First of all, anybody who ever set foot in Israel knows Israeli society is incredibly racially diverse - Jews come from Europe, from Middle East, from Africa, from a huge number of places.
Obviously I am considering Jews to be a single race in this context, just like Israel does.
And of course Israel is full of other religious and ethnic groups - Christians, Muslims, Bahai, Druze, Bedouin, Circassian, I could be here all day.
Yeah, just like South Africa was a very racially diverse country under Apartheid. Still, the laws of Apartheid made it a country designed first and foremost around the well-being of white people, establishing a racial hierarchy, where other races were tolerated at best, with far lesser rights. Non-Jews are not treated as first-class citizens in Israel. So the goal was to create a racially pure society where the only equals that white people met would be other whites.
Note that this is not the same as a racially pure country, where only one race is tolerated in the country. Slave-era US states also had the goal of a racially pure society, but were obviously far from a single-race state.
And South Africa did its best to ensure racial purity by intermarriage laws. While Israel doesn't go as far, they do not have civil marriage, and all marriages must happen under religious laws that restrict intermarriage. And religion is of course very strongly linked to race.
It is just torturing the definition of "race" to describe a completely normal and common thing - a national state. Israel is the state of Jews in the same meaning as Japan is the state of Japanese, China is the state of Chinese and Greece is the state of Greeks.
No, you are torturing the definition of race. Greek citizenship is based on whether the person is legally living there, not their race. Greek nationality law does have a provision to expedite the naturalization of 'ethnic Greeks' according to Wikipedia, but that merely requires the person to have a parent or grandparent that was born a Greek national. So their legal definition of ethnic Greek does not seem to be actually ethnic. It doesn't matter if that parent or grandparent is ethnically Greek, Albanian, Roma, Jewish, etc, as long as they were born a legal Greek citizen.
This is different from Israel, where they will let in Jews who have been in the diaspora for very many generations, but not people who were actually born in the territory of current Israel, but that fled during the 1948 Palestine war.
except that somehow Israel is held to insane and impossible standards never applied to any other nation.
All these 'insane and impossible standards' are only insane and impossible if you consider the goal of a racially defined state that gets to steal land from people to be legitimate. For example, it's basic international law that refugees should be allowed to return to their homes after a conflict, but in the case of Israel this is somehow suddenly completely unreasonable.
And of course it is completely unreasonable to expect Israel not to take Syrian land that is just there for the taking, just like the international community is totally fine with Russia taking territory. Only Israel gets criticized, you see. No one is funding Ukraine so it can defend itself.
This tired talking point about double standards being applied to Israel is the most worn out argument that is just based on playing the victim. That way you don't actually have to defend the behavior, which is often indefensible.
Even though Israeli Arabs (of which many do not identify as "Palestinians" at all and do not want to live under Hamas rule) have exactly the same rights and citizenship as everybody else
False. Israeli Arabs are excluded from conscription, so they are not equal.
But most discrimination happens through laws that are ostensibly neutral, but applied unequally. For example, the law on removing the citizenship for 'acts of terror' is not applied equally to Jewish terrorists. In fact, Israeli soldiers have been known to just let Jews commit terrorist attacks: https://www.btselem.org/node/216862
So if an Arab commits a terror attack, he can lose his citizenship and be kicked out. If a Jew does so, the Israeli military is there to make sure that the terrorist doesn't get hurt. Very considerate.
You can't even keep it straight in one sentence. You can't accuse Israel in both ghetto-ising the Arab population and ethnically cleansing them - it's the diametrically opposite actions
So when Hitler was using ghettos to isolate the Jews from support by non-Jews and to make it easy for him to implement his final solution, he was actually accidentally protecting the Jews by putting them into the ghetto?
An interesting take on history to be sure.
In ghetto, you put the bad people into a confined space, in cleansing, you remove them from the space.
Driving people together is a typical precursor to cleansing.
Anyway, my claim is not that the Israeli leadership has a singular goal. They have more and less radical elements. Some want mere ghettos, some want ethnic cleansing and a few seem to want a genocide. None seem to want a viable Palestinian state (or states).
if you let Arabs have their own territory, rules by themselves [...] that's a ghetto, bad thing.
I have a hard time believing that you are arguing in good faith if you equate a free nation state to a ghetto. Setting up a straw man where you, without any evidence, claim that I would call a free Palestinian state a ghetto is not a basis for a debate.
And you don't have to look far and wide for it, you just ask anybody in Gaza what they want. They will tell you - they want to "free Palestine" from Jews. [...] . Not equal rights with the Jews but the Jews dead.
You are treating a diverse group of people as a single hive mind, which is just another form of strawmanning. I have seen no poll that shows that all Palestinians are in favor of killing all Jews. I find it extremely unlikely that is the case. But please provide the proof if you have any.
Just the usual billion dollars a year of international aid adds up over time
Not really when the 'grass gets mowed' every so often and everything that is build up is razed to the ground. And then there are all the restrictions that mean that they simply can't use the money to build a solid economy. From my perspective, all that aid just goes into a black hole.
Note that Israel has now been systematically destroying Gaza, so it takes enormous resources just to build back housing, hospitals, schools, etc. So even getting back to a aid-dependent economy with basic needs being met, will requires enormous investments.
I'm not sure how much Israel would contribute
You really think that after just razing most of Gaza to the ground, they will spend a lot of money to rebuild it???
Was my "several hours later" link broken? Ongoing attacks are very good evidence that attacks will be ongoing; that's not a matter of trust or distrust, just inductive reasoning.
It is very obvious that there is a conflict happening where both parties distrust each other immensely and use violence against each other. You keep spending effort to prove this (albeit in a rather biased way), as if it is in doubt and as if scoring brownie points about this matters if the goal is actual peace.
You undermine your own point with your 'inductive reasoning,' because if you limit yourself to extrapolating short term trends then your fantasy that a unilateral surrender is a reasonable thing to demand and would solve the problem is absurd. Because inductive reasoning would not make one conclude that the Palestinians would give up violence, especially when an oppressive regime governs them. And inductive reasoning would not lead one to conclude that Israel would suddenly change course and allow the Palestinians to actually build up a proper economy.
Is there an issue with hyperlinks here? I'm not sure you read mine, and I can't even see yours.
I put two hyperlinks in my previous post, and I can see yours.
This is the sort of thing that requires a source.
That's an unreasonable request when it is a pattern of behavior that goes back a long time. Besides, modern search engines are fully enshittified now, so finding proper evidence has gotten ever harder.
Or is it that you're under the impression that insults are appropriate on TheMotte but sources are not? The opposite is true.
It is a criticism of your beliefs, which is not a personal insult, unless you believe that I may not dismiss your beliefs.
Ultimately, the idea that all Palestinians can suddenly be made to no longer be violent, is absurd. It either requires the belief that the Palestinians are a hive mind, or that Hamas or whomever have a perfect way of controlling the behavior of every person. If your solutions are build on such absurd beliefs, then I cannot take them seriously.
Note that it is just as absurd to think that Israeli settlers and Israeli soldiers can be made to suddenly stop using unjustified violence against Palestinians.
I'd hoped you would find it valuable to learn that you were so wrong about Gazan overpopulation
Sorry for not fisking your entire comment. After all, even if you were right on this point, it still would not actually disprove my claims, that merely require that overpopulation exists, not a specific cause. But you are wrong:
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/g-s1-59633/gaza-buffer-zone-israel-military
And note that I never claimed that this is the only reason for overpopulation.
Aapje58
2mo ago
It would have to start the same way Dresden's and Tokyo's and Hiroshima's economic recovery did: by surrendering to the vastly militarily superior opponent.
And then what? Do you believe that Israel would then come in with a Marshall Plan, like the US did after WW 2? The big issue for decades has been that Israel does not trust the Palestinians to build up an economy and not use those resources to attack Israel. Israel's policy has always been to attack innocent Palestinians and destroy their property, when even relatively minor attacks happened. That is not how you get peace, but rather, how you get a forever war, where each new generation learns that there is no hope of a good life by doing the regular things to achieve that (getting an education and investing in companies).
The childish fantasy that each and every Palestinian would magically and suddenly stop believing in violence as a solution is not a way out of the conflict. It is as realistic as thinking that Israeli settlers would suddenly stop using violence against Palestinians, which Israel also has never been able to stop (but refuses to admit to that, because then it would expose their hypocrisy). So a total surrender, whatever that even means in the chaos that is Gaza, where central control surely doesn't exist anymore, will just lead to new forms of oppression of the Palestinians, that will inevitably cause people to rebel against that oppression with violence.
Fact is that the PA has been collaborating with Israel for a very long time, and Israel had (and still has) a perfect opportunity to gradually reduce restrictions on the West Bank, to actually give Palestinians a way out, by showing that there is an opportunity to build up a prosperous Palestinian state. However, instead, Israel is treating the PA like the Judenrat where the PA is supposed to keep the Palestinians compliant, while their land is getting taken from them, and they are being kept in a closed off ghetto with no prospect of building up anything.
The fact that Israel even threats Palestinian Israeli's as second-class citizens and that Israel is explicitly society that is only supposed to serve one race shows that there is inherently no desire to allow Palestinians to co-exist on an equal level. If you see Israel for what it is, a society that aims to be racially pure, then it is absolutely no surprise that the only solutions that it is willing to accept are permanent ghetto's, ethnic cleansing and solutions of that kind, and not a reasonable solution for the Palestinians (whether that is their own state, equal rights within Israel, or whatever).
Aapje58
2mo ago
Toilet wine is not agriculture. It's a mere conversion of one food stuff to another, and doesn't produce nutrients. Toilet wine is made from food given to the prisoners by the guards, so it's a very poor argument in the context of food self-sufficiency of Gaza.
Keep in mind that Gaza is a desert region, so farming there is not easy. Especially since Gaza lies at the sea, so you have salt-water intrusion into the ground water. And the various disruptive behaviors of the Israeli settlers and government goes back for decades, which makes it a lot harder to farm. The area is also heavily overpopulated, in part due to the Israeli policy of taking ever more land from the Palestinians. The population density of Gaza is slightly smaller than of Hong Kong, so it is effectively a city state. It is not reasonable to expect much agriculture with that level of population density.
Gaza seems to have been a total economic basketcase going back decades.
Do you really think that it is reasonable to expect anything else given the conditions during those decades? For example, Israel never allowed Gaza to build a harbor so they could trade with other nations. If you were in charge in Gaza, how would you create a healthy economy?
Aapje58
2mo ago
Not so much anymore since the mass destruction of buildings and orchards, and the intentional destruction of water sources.
Your comment is as ridiculous as wondering why a prisoner who is locked in a cell requires food being brought in, and can't just grow his own food, when any attempt to create a mini-farm, would be destroyed by the guards.
Aapje58
6mo ago
Unless youre counting land collectivisation per se, most peasants didn't have to actively participate.
All organizations had to be explicitly communist, even for doing hobbies, which is definitely totalitarian.
Aapje58
6mo ago
But what if an upstanding and polite civil society is the very thing I want to preserve?
Then the left needs to learn that their ratfucking has eroded civil society and they will suffer for it as well. Perhaps then they will want to rebuilt it.
If I want to preserve traditional Western morality and institutions
How can you preserve something that no longer exists? Morality and institutions have to be rebuilt.
I find it hard to believe surrendering a political movement to a figurehead who is hostile to its very principles is the winning play to bring about those principles.
The problem is that the left has gotten addicted to hatred and oppression, and even if the right would put forth a Gandhi, he would be treated like a Hitler.
Trump's willingness to burn down institutions is a necessary harsh lesson to the left that the right won't let themselves be put into the reservation. Either the left makes institutions that the right is a part of and that they can support, or the right will keep attempting to burn them down.
Aapje58
6mo ago
The courts alternatively pretend to be pure objectivity or to have a heavenly mandate in their subjectivity, but the mundane reality is that just like with kings, the pretense requires sufficient popular support, or the (figurative) guillotine comes into play.
Aapje58
7mo ago
It's more similar to the native American situation. Yield land to appease the colonists and they will just come back to claim more once their needs grow, until only a fraction of land is left that is not worth the effort to take.
Aapje58
7mo ago
I got to wonder if NDT doesn’t have some MeToo skeletons in his closet that he is desperately trying to keep hidden with all this claptrap
The simpler explanation is that he's a grifter who abuses his charisma to earn money by playing the role of a scientist, and he's been gradually expanding his repertoire to have more business opportunities.
And with the media being mostly far-left, pretending that far-left nonsense is scientifically valid, is the way for him to get more shows and such.
Aapje58
7mo ago
Why would you need 'experts' (often captured by ideology) or even worse, upvoted posts (virtue signalling), rather than just look at the hard data? Nearly all sports allow for intergender competition and/or have an objective measurement of performance (often timings). In most sports the gaps are so enormous that there is no doubt at all.
Aapje58
8mo ago
Tyrannies are problematic because there's rarely a good plan for what comes next. Once a tyranny ends (i.e. tyrant dies) there is chaos or more tyranny.
No, this is why hereditary monarchy was invented.
Aapje58
9mo ago
He doesn't wear blue contacts. You can see that he has blue eyes in images of him as a pubescent youngster.
Aapje58
10mo ago
Cycling absolutely requires a helmet.
Yes, that's why there are no people who cycle without a helmet for their entire life and live. Oh wait.
That helmet saved my life.
It's impossible to say whether that is the case, since depending on the quality and design on the helmet, and how you landed, the helmet could have reduced the energy transferred to your head anywhere between almost zero to a significant amount. And even if you had been worse off, that doesn't mean you would have died.
You really should improve your reasoning ability, because the statement you made is closer to religion than to fact.
Aapje58
10mo ago
At least with a sidewalk or a separate path, you’re not blocking cars.
Why would a cyclist care about that? This is like trying to convince a Democrat to emigrate, so Republicans can govern the US as they want.
And cars block other cars quite a lot, so by your reasoning, people should stop driving and walk instead (which has the minimum amount of blockage).
Aapje58
10mo ago
I think the solution for most (nearly all?) of these scenarios is for the cyclists to go slower.
If you are a car in a crowded city you should not expect to be able to travel very fast, and certainly no where near the maximum capabilities of your vehicle and personal reaction times. Some cyclists seems to have this expectation.
That's because the speeds that cyclists expect to go are still not as fast as drivers expect to go in the city. Cars do not have the right to go faster in the city just because they are completely overbuilt for that environment.
I rode a bicycle on a university campus for 3 semesters until it got stolen. Its basically nothing but super crowded sidewalks constantly, with occasional glimpses of open space where you can go a little faster. I never hit anyone during this time. I also wasn't trying to go ~18mph.
Having mixed use like this is a way in which infrastructure can be designed, as can prevent accidents due to a sense of entitlement. But it only really works in certain situations, mainly involving 'last mile' traffic close to people's destination. Long haul routes cannot be designed this way.
Aapje58
10mo ago
If some space must be carved out of somewhere for the sake of cyclists, I think sidewalk space should be carved out before street space.
In the Netherlands, there are a lot of non-urban bicycle paths which are also used by pedestrians, runners, etc. This is generally fine (although pedestrians behave more poorly than cyclists), since the paths are suitable for cycling speeds and nicely flat.
And that cyclists should be held to sidewalk rules rather than street rules, since they can more easily follow sidewalk rules.
I think that sidewalk rules are worse to cyclists than a 10-20 mph zone is to drivers. At least the drivers get decent roads in that case.
Aapje58
10mo ago
The danger is stupid drivers who think that there is room when there isn't, and when they have a choice between hitting a car (low chance of injury) or the cyclist, they plow into the cyclist.
Aapje58
10mo ago
You're entirely correct but ... aren't large expenditures of your personal physical energy half the point of biking?
The other half is going places, the joy of the ride, etc.
Also, a cyclist tends to plan to use a certain amount of energy by picking a certain route. Going over budget is not necessarily preferred.
Aapje58
10mo ago
(1) A speed limit is not a minimum. (2) You are supposed to be able to stop even for stopped traffic, not depend on magic escape routes to get you out of trouble. (3) You are supposed to drive in a way that is suitable for the circumstances.
And bike trails can be quite short, unsuitable for a racing bike, not linked to other nice roads that one might use, etc.
Is it really dumb to believe that people believe in dumb ideas? Don't you see people all around you that do so? Why would the Jews of the past be immune to wishful thinking and the like?
Note that information spread much more difficult in the past, and there especially was much less hard evidence (photo, video, etc) in the first place, and the hard evidence there was could not just be put on the internet in one location, where others could then see on the other side of the world. It's not like today where the media (and often by extension governments) are increasingly upset that their ability to control public perception is much less than in the past. For it to be very dumb to think that shower rooms that look like shower rooms, are not actually shower rooms, one would need more than just a general idea that people were killed, and even more than an idea that gas was used, but to have an understanding of the procedure. Otherwise they could very easily see this as just a precursor to being placed in a concentration camp (where disease risk is very real, of course), not as the actual killing procedure.
Imagine that those gas chambers actually did exist as claimed. Then how do you reckon that people that were being transported in from very far away, would come to know how the procedure was done?
So where did all the Jews go from countries that kept very accurate record about their population? And are all of the witnesses who gave testimony about the Holocaust part of a big conspiracy? What is your position even? That there was mass murder, but not with gas? Or do you deny mass killings in general?
But the Jews are historic outliers! Throughout the ages they have faced persecution like no other race. And historically their culture was not one of fighting back or establishing their own country, but accepting oppression, fleeing, etc. The Nazis took advantage of this by establishing Judenräte and Jewish leaders were all too eager to participate in this, based on the idea that working with the Nazis would cause them to be nicer.
Where most people would figure out after a persecution or two that they might need their own country under their own rule, the Jews clearly didn't think this way for a very long time.
That said, this culture was already in the process of changing at the time, which is why what would later become Israel was already in the making when WW2 started. However, the Jews that moved to Mandatory Palestine would actually remove Jews with a willingness to fight back from the Diaspora, so the remaining Jews would be less prone to fight back, if anything.
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