No?
The original question is who the territory belonged to. The answer, in most legal contexts, is no one, because there isn't a formal Palestinian state. It would have belonged to Egypt and Jordan if they'd taken it back. That they didn't want it back doesn't mean their recognition of Palestine at different times for different reasons didn't create a de jure Palestinian state. It may be de facto Palestinian territory, and will likely be de jure Palestinian territory in any future negotiated system, but until there is an actual Palestinian state, it's in many respects just stateless territory. The difference between it and other de facto states is simply that no one really claims it, not that the people who actually live in de facto states are also real states too.
You thought it a silly comparison probably, but the Antarctica treaty isn't the worse comparison. Another are the spaces in the middle of the great oceans. While it is indeed extremely uncommon on land, if no recognized state exists in an area, it belongs to no state.
Obviously the circumstances of the Palestinian territories that trying to treat it as empty terrain would be considerably different, but the constraints on that are much more a matter of politics and humanitarian law than sovereign territory law.
Dean
1d ago
The "easing up" looked like thousands of Palestinians being killed in retaliation for a single-digit number of Israelis killed every few years.
You... do know that the proportionality argument of international law is about the proportional size of the bombs used to kill people, not the relative proportions killed between factions, right?
Going just by raw numbers, in the back-and-forth of action and reaction, it really looks a lot like the Israelis are constantly escalating and the Palestinians are constantly deescalating - there is not a single instance of Palestinians killing Israelis that was not followed by Israelis killing more Palestinians, and no single instance of Israelis killing Palestinians that was not followed by Palestinians killing fewer Israelis.
Why are you going by raw numbers of casualties, rather than raw numbers of attack attempts or missiles fired?
That someone tries to kill often, but is bad at it, doesn't mean that an increase in attempts at killing that get worse over time is a de-escalation of killing intent.
Dean
1d ago
"Rule of law" or "rules-based order" is usually taken to mean an impartial system that constrains great and small alike.
This is smuggling connotations into international law that the principle never merited. The constraints on powers great and small by international law are what the powers agreed to, not imposed. There are, indeed, many areas where the US (and others) self-constrains, but the ICC is one where the US (and others) do not, for reasons which you have not actually countered.
I do not think that this is stable long term.
Nothing about an anarchic system is stable in the long run, and the first principle of the international arena is its anarchic manner. This is why the international system doesn't run on imposing restrictions such as the ICC by fiat- trying to do so triggers more violent resistance more easily.
Dean
1d ago
Not really. Or at least, there are ulterior motives/incentives at the least.
For the Egyptians, it was likely to avoid having to take responsibility for the Palestinians in Gaza, and to keep an irritant in Israel's side that they could stoke or cool as a matter of leverage. Israel offered / tried to return Gaza to Egypt with the rest of the Sinai, and Egypt refused. If it was simply about recognizing a state of Palestine, they could have accepted and transferred authority to a SoP figure, but that would have entailed responsibility on economic/political/diplomatic fronts.
For the Jordanians, the renunciation of claims on the West Bank was a consequence of the aftermath of Black September, and as a way for the Monarchy to disempower the legislature. Most remember Black September as a civil war- and it was- but fewer remember that the Jordanian parliament was dominated by Palestinian interests because it was seating Palestinians based on the territorial claims of uncontrolled West Bank. By renouncing the claims, the Jordanian Monarchy was able to cut the Palestinian faction of the Parliament down to size and no longer the political threat it was.
Dean
1d ago
I appreciate the detailed writeup. I will freely concede the following points: your analysis is probably correct, and the ICC's verdict is probably tendentious and politically motivated.
I am, I'm afraid, arguing vibes.
Understood. And in return, I hate vibe-based policy, especially on the international stage. Vibe-diplomacy is how we go from R2P to slave markets in Libya and a massive discreditation of nuclear non-proliferation concessions by dictators. Vibe-diplomacy is how we get ideological powers like the US running amuck in Iraq because of their vibes of the moment, or revaunchist powers trying to rebuild dead empires by invading their neighbors, and a general lack of consistency and predictability that ruins people in mass when vibes shift. Passion can do many great and terrible things, and as a rule I hate when passionate people act with words backed by nuclear-capable missiles.
Down with vibe-policy. Death to vibe-plomacy.
Given that, for America to exempt itself and its vassals from the international court with jurisdiction over
(a) The crime of genocide; (b) Crimes against humanity; (c) War crimes; (d) The crime of aggression.
The International Court does not have jurisdiction over those crimes. The International Court has jurisdiction over the countries that agree it has jurisdiction over those crimes, if those countries are not pursuing it themselves. The jurisdiction is both conditional to a party's membership/consent, and the ICC does not serve as an alternative / appeal for national court cases on the same line of effort.
Your vibes are putting the cart before the horse. The International Criminal Court doesn't simply exist, and then all other countries acknowledge its supremacy on the topic. Other countries exist, and agree with eachother to defer to the ICC for their own reasons. The reasons vary, but most have had a cynical component, include foreign aid bribery.
and to explicitly threaten employees of the court is a very bad look. It makes people start to wonder why America feels that laws around genocide and war crimes are "inapplicable or inappropriate" when applied to America. It brings back memories of the invasion of Iraq. It also brings back memories of things like the unequal extradition treaty between America and the UK. It's as though Bill Gates declared that he was too important to be bound by laws against murder, or at the very least demanded the right to determine whether those laws were being correctly applied to him and his friends on a case-by-case basis.
I would agree it's a bad look, as I'm sure you'd agree those people would be ignorant of what laws the US is bound by, and those people wondering likely weren't reading the ICC's own reports.
There are many reasons that the ICC released reports on its decisions not to pursue charges against the US in the Iraq contexts, and unless you think they're lying in their conclusions due to threats none of them exactly end with 'we conclude the Americans have a policy of -X-, but we lack the ability to go after them' rather than 'we have no evidence to believe a systemic policy warranting further investigation was pursued.' While I'm sure some would take the dodge of 'well, the US pressured them to change their position,' this would itself be an argument that the ICC is corrupt and vulnerable to political influence from non-members, let alone what would be expected were the US to be a part of it.
it would be immoral to force nation-states to be governed by agreements they did not agree to
Precisely as immoral as it is to force people to be governed by laws they didn't sign.
Fortunately, much of the international order doesn't force people to be governed by laws they didn't sign, and instead gives them means to retract their signatures if their opinions change. Others may not like it when they renenge on agreements, but that is a sovereign right (and consequence).
In short, does America sincerely believe that it is too important and powerful to answer to anyone else? America's behavior suggests that the answer is yes, and any intimations otherwise is 'who, whom' propaganda. The more America resorts to economic and diplomatic coercion, the less interested everyone else is in helping to maintain the system and America's place in it.
There's two different dynamics to this paragraph that prompt two different response.
Part one, on the first two sentences, is who else are the Americans- or anyone else- supposed to answer to if not their own governments, and their governments to their own constituents?
The international system is, above all, anarchic. There is no higher authority to appeal to, and no authority in a democratic system more legitimate than the electorate and its representatives through their enshrined legal standard either. This is not some Americanism either- this is the same deal with why the UK Parliament is Sovereign, why EU legal Supremacy is routinely checked by German or other national Supreme Courts ruling something is against the National Constitution, and countless other variations and permutations. International law's legitimacy does not derive from being international law, it derives from the nations that back it, and they in turn derive their legitimacy from whatever mertis their popular support.
A decision not to join the ICC isn't a matter of power, it's a matter of sovereign deference. There are many countries- weak, stronger, moderate- that do not. If you want to get down to it, only about half of the world's population is in a country that abides by the ICC, which is to say that about half of the world's population doesn't abide by the IPC.
The second is a challenge to the assumption that the ICC is part of the American international system, as opposed to an attempt to co-opt it and develop of a coercive tool of diplomacy independent of the Americans.
There's a reason that the ICC is viewed in much of the world as more of a European than American project, and that's long been both a part of its attraction and its weakness. The US wasn't the champion of the ICC as an international system, the Europeans were, and expanding it was a matter of policy for the last two decades. One of the reasons the map shows most of Africa, for example, was that the Europeans made it a notable part of the Cotonou Agreement, which is to say a condition for systemic aid flow. The ICC is primarily funded by the Europeans, the location primacy is obvious, and there's long been a tension as to whether it functions as a tool for post-colonial influence in Africa by its historical focus on Africa. While there are structural arguments as to why it's perfectly appropriate for the ICC to spend most of it's time prosecuting poorer states and not the rich and powerful ones, this is what the ICC is without the US bankroll or direction, not because of it.
There's plenty to be said about about the ICC's place in the international order- and an argument to be made that the mid-2000s tensions between the ICC and the US/UK was the effects of an institutionalist power play between the Franco-German block of the EU trying to punish the UK for breaking ranks and joining the US war in Iraq while trying to secure geopolitical leverage of the US- but the key point is this.
If someone told you the ICC was a key part of the American international order, it wasn't the Americans.
Having said all of that, I think that international law is an extremely flawed concept. The idea that one government can enter into an agreement that is considered binding on subsequent governments decades later seems ludicrous and anti-democratic. As with most law, it's ultimately a fudge for applying coercive power in a manner that is mostly accepted and results in minimal fuss. I wouldn't bear America any ill will for saying, "our voters are pro-Israel and we feel the need to act accordingly, regardless of international law" provided that they extended the same courtesy to everybody else.
They do extend you the same courtesy as everyone else. You are bound by the same international laws as you agreed to or maintain alignment with.
If you wish to be the bound by the same international laws as the United States, and no more, you have to agree to the same international laws as the United States has signed, and no more.
Dean
1d ago
What was the diplomatic position of the United States about the ICC charging Vladimir Putin?
Legit question?
As a formal position, they've been mostly silent, with various policy-journal debates on how much to support or not. Some elements have used it as an argument to join the Rome Statute entirely, others resist.
As a practical / strategic position, the US is happy to help investigate / catalog war crimes, and then signal-boosting the ICC's findings to other ICC states to complicate Russia's relations. While the US itself isn't a member of the ICC, many of Russia's partners are, and so helping the ICC works against Russia and to the US interest even if no arrest is made.
As a legal position? That ICC has limited jurisdiction over various crimes in Ukrainian territory due to Ukraine inviting them to.
This is the ICC bulletin rather than a US statement, but the US would generally follow the point:
Ukraine is not a State Party to the Rome Statute, but it has twice exercised its prerogatives to accept the Court's jurisdiction over alleged crimes under the Rome Statute occurring on its territory, pursuant to article 12(3) of the Statute. The first declaration lodged by the Government of Ukraine accepted ICC jurisdiction with respect to alleged crimes committed on Ukrainian territory from 21 November 2013 to 22 February 2014. The second declaration extended this time period on an open-ended basis to encompass ongoing alleged crimes committed throughout the territory of Ukraine from 20 February 2014 onwards.
The general position of the US in Iraq or Afghanistan is that the US forces remained in the government after the initial invasions at the request of the legitimate and internationally recognized governments, with whom the US had a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that governed authorized activities and how to handle incidents of misconduct (including how trials would occur). The position would be that misconduct by US forces wasn't a matter of policy or purpose, but something the US would investigate and if appropriate prosecute soldiers for when identified. The US would provide data and information to support that point when asked, even as it denied the ICC had a jurisdiction to detain or try US soldiers.
The main contrasts with the Russian position is that Ukraine is an internationally recognized state who has invited the ICC in to investigate what has occurred on internationally recognized Ukrainian territory, but the Iraqi/Afghan governmets that were internationally recognized were not trying to invite the ICC against the US or its coalitions*.
*This is why most of the ICC applications in the context of Iraq were centered on the UK. Between the US, the UK, and Iraq, the UK was the only one the ICC had automatic jurisdiction over and could compel cooperation from.
Dean
1d ago
Either you believe in an international rules-based order or you don’t.
To believe in an international rules-based order, you have to believe that there are actual rules, or else it's an arbitrary vibes-based order. And while I do like my vibing, the text of the Rome Statute of the International Court is easily accessible and free online.
Not to spoil too much in advance, but the scope of the ICC has limits. There's a reason the preamble to the Rome Statute of the International Court starts with 'The States Parties to this statute' (distinguishing them from States not party to the statute), and emphasizes '
Emphasizing in this connection that nothing in this Statue shall be taken as authorizing any State Party to intervene in an armed conflict or in the internal affairs of any State.
(No, there is no definition of what 'intervene' means in this context. Which means the prohibition is as small, or large, as you want or can get away with.)
But preambles are fluff. Other limits are baked into the law and include where it may exercise its functions and powers-
Article 4 - Legal status and powers of the Court 2. The Court may exercise its functions and powers, as provided in this Statute, on the territory of any State Party and, by special agreement, on the territory of any other State.
- and preconditions on the exercise of ICC jurisdiction.
Article 12 - Preconditions to the exercise of jurisdiction
- A State which becomes a Party to this Statute thereby accepts the jurisdiction of the Court with respect to the crimes referred to in article 5.
- In the case of article 13, paragraph (a) or (c), the Court may exercise its jurisdiction if one or more of the following States are Parties to this Statute or have accepted the jurisdiction of the Court in accordance with paragraph 3: (a) The State on the territory of which the conduct in question occurred or, if the crime was committed on board a vessel or aircraft, the State of registration of that vessel or aircraft; (b) The State of which the person accused of the crime is a national.
- If the acceptance of a State which is not a Party to this Statute is required under paragraph 2, that State may, by declaration lodged with the Registrar, accept the exercise of jurisdiction by the Court with respect to the crime in question. The accepting State shall cooperate with the Court without any delay or exception in accordance with Part 9.
To wit- by the very rule creating the ICC, the ICC's jurisdiction is explicitly conditional, not universal. It is conditional on a state becoming a party to the Statute, or having accepted the jurisdiction of the Court over the matter (either in general or for the specific issue). If these preconditions are not met, the ICC as a court does not have jurisdiction.
Simply as a principle, the ICC does not have universal jurisdiction. That is a matter of international law.
Now, that's not the end of the matter as it relates to Israel, but it the start of a very significant snarl that will generally require you to presume a conclusion in order to resolve.
Claims of ICC jurisdiction over the Israeli-Hamas conflict hinge on Article 12 Para 2, subparagraph (a), 'The State on which the territory of which the conduct in question occurred.' This is the 'if it occurs on the territory of a State that is a member of the ICC, the ICC has jurisdiction' approach. The ICC position is that the State of Palestine is a member, as of 2015. This gives it the jurisdiction over the territory of it's member, the State of Palestine. What is the territory of the State of Palestine? Well, the ICC position is that it's jurisdiction territorially extends to the West Bank (which is under Israeli military occupation), Eastern Jerusalem (which is annexed by Israel), and the Gaza Strip.
Of course, this itself brings back issues going back to the jurisdiction. Setting aside the first two, the jurisdiction over the Gaza Strip is based on the claim of the ICC-acknowledged State of Palestine, which was admitted in 2015.
Except, of course, that the State of Palestine- as represented by the PLO that is the West Bank signatory- not only wasn't a recognized sovereign state in 2015 by inclusion into the United Nations (which is the primary international organization the ICC text aligns it with in terms of seeking information), it wasn't even in control of the Gaza Strip as a de facto state. The PLO was thrown out of the Gazan Strip- and thrown off buildings in the Gaza Strip- in 2007, nearly a decade before the ICC accession.
In other words, the ICC granted itself jurisdiction of territories not on the basis of the international law, but on the basis of internal decision on grounds of admitting a state not recognized by the United Nations as a sovereign state that said state had lost before joining the ICC. The international law basis of this conclusion is, well, as convincing as it needs to be if you're convinced.
Moreover, even the Article 12-Para B route of jurisdictions runs into the issue that the jurisdiction of actors/territories runs into the questions of jurisdiction of applicable crimes.
Article 5 - Crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court The jurisdiction of the Court shall be limited to the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole. The Court has jurisdiction in accordance with this Statute with respect to the following crimes: (a) The crime of genocide; (b) Crimes against humanity; (c) War crimes; (d) The crime of aggression.
This is obviously contested given the hyperbolic propaganda surrounding the conflict, but in a very short form the death tolls we're seeing versus the firepower used are not really consistent with genocidal practices in other contexts unless you stretch the term genocide to it's lesser scopes and extremes that lose moral relevance due to overuse, and the arguments on war crimes typically run into the issue that the laws of war do not actually prohibit targeting military objectives even when civilian casualties are incurred (a common vibes-based misunderstanding).
The category of crime most relevant to the ICC in the context of the Israel incursion into Gazi might be the crime of aggression, which covers all the banal evils of war-
Article 8 - Crime of aggression
- For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations.
- For the purpose of paragraph 1, “act of aggression” means the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations. Any of the following acts, regardless of a declaration of war, shall, in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974, qualify as an act of aggression: (a) The invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State, or any military occupation, however temporary, resulting from such invasion or attack, or any annexation by the use of force of the territory of another State or part thereof; (b) Bombardment by the armed forces of a State against the territory of another State or the use of any weapons by a State against the territory of another State; (c) The blockade of the ports or coasts of a State by the armed forces of another State; (d) An attack by the armed forces of a State on the land, sea or air forces, or marine and air fleets of another State; (e) The use of armed forces of one State which are within the territory of another State with the agreement of the receiving State, in contravention of the conditions provided for in the agreement or any extension of their presence in such territory beyond the termination of the agreement; (f) The action of a State in allowing its territory, which it has placed at the disposal of another State, to be used by that other State for perpetrating an act of aggression against a third State; (g) The sending by or on behalf of a State of armed bands, groups, irregulars or mercenaries, which carry out acts of armed force against another State of such gravity as to amount to the acts listed above, or its substantial involvement therein
...except that the very same Rome Statute establishing the ICC explicitly forbids that.
Article 15 - Exercise of jurisdiction over the crime of aggression 5. In respect of a State that is not a party to this Statute, the Court shall not exercise its jurisdiction over the crime of aggression when committed by that State’s nationals or on its territory.
Which, in turn, is why the lawfare opposition to Israel in the ICC has to frame issues in terms of genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes- because those are the only categories of crimes that the ICC could potentially have jurisdiction of. If one buys the jurisdiction-via-signatory state argument that extends the ICC jurisdiction from the PLO-based West Bank to the Israeli-annexed Eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
Except, of course, that the generally accepted internal status of the West Bank is that it is under Israeli military occupation- which goes back to Article 8, which defines the Crime of Aggression
Article 8 - Crime of Aggression
- For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations.
- For the purpose of paragraph 1, “act of aggression” means the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations. Any of the following acts, regardless of a declaration of war, shall, in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974, qualify as an act of aggression: (a) The invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State, or any military occupation, however temporary, resulting from such invasion or attack, or any annexation by the use of force of the territory of another State or part thereof;
...which returns, again, to the question of jurisdiction.
For the ICC Jurisdiction chain to hold coherently, Israel must not be in a crime of aggression in its military occupation of the West Bank, despite having been accused of illegally occupying Palestine for over a half century, so that there can be a sovereign state of Palestine based in the West Bank to be a signatory state of the ICC, so that said state of Palestine can have territory for the ICC to have jurisdiction over. Said territory was determined by the ICC according to itself, absent any UN-recognized territorial state, to extend to the West Bank, which the nominal State of Palestine did not hold or govern for nearly a decade prior to its accession, so that the ICC may have jurisdiction of crimes against humanity / war crimes / genocide, but not crimes of aggression, in the current conflict between two belligerents, of whom neither are signatories of the Rome Statute.
This is, shall we say, just a little tenuous.
The fact that America supports international governance when and only when it gets to be in charge makes it look cynical and prevents people cooperating with it.
And that's a Good Thing(TM). Much of international law is inapplicable or inappropriate for many parts of the international community, and it would be immoral to force nation-states to be governed by agreements they did not agree to. There's a reason most international arbitration bodies- including the ICC- have clauses that they only apply to non-members if non-members assent for specific situations.
The Americans, much like the Europeans and everyone else in the international relations sphere, are very consistent that they are only bound by international agreements they have agreed to be bound by. That agreement may be a concession, conditional, or even coerced to some degree (though not by all measures), and a lack of agreement may be condemned, but the agreement is required due to the principles of sovereignty involved.
As such, it is quite normal and accepted for states to not only advocate for other people to come in agreements and be bound by international laws they themselves wouldn't want to be a part of- see the non-European support for the European Union accession of various states, or the various environmental conferences- but also seeks exceptions or refuse to partake in other states agreements.
The premise of the rules-based order is not, and never has been, that states are subject to agreements they haven't been party to. Rather, it's been that reneging or violating agreements that one is party to offers basis for action against a state. Not-entering an agreement has always been a different, and generally preferable, state than agreeing to and then breaking international law.
Sure, it's not trivial to disentangle. I've seen notions aired to the point that if only true free speech/press was reestablished for a year and then fair elections held then Putinism would stand no chance, and somebody like Navalny could win. This seems extremely naive and out-of-touch to me, I'm sure that Putin (or a better anti-Western demagogue) would win.
And again, I'd disagree with your conclusion and your framing. Fortunately the naive position is not my position, and on a historical point Putin's ascent did not base itself on anti-Western demogoguery, which was not particularly potent at the time, but far more of an anti-Russian-internal-factors. While the early 2000s Russian political moment was ending the chaos of the 90s, that chaos was primarily internal in nature and origin (corruption, oligarchic abuse, failures of governance), and Putin didn't run on any particularly anti-Western tenor. Anti-western political themes began in earnest in the later 2000s, well after Putin's ascent, consolidation, and transition to killing dissidents who'd threaten popularity.
Of course there are obvious selection effects too. Also, when the invasion began and hundreds of thousands of Russians most willing to flee did so, they found no particularly warm welcome anywhere they tried to go. Most of them have since returned, and even they grudgingly agree that there is something to the Russophobia that state propaganda doesn't shut up about, having personally experienced it.
You, uh, should probably re-check your migration data, because your impression is very likely to be a propaganda selection effect.
While unbiased sources are certainly hard to find, reporting from last year was generally around the 15% return rate. Even it the return rate was double that, it'd still be very far from most. While there is certainly a national interest / Russian propaganda narrative to create a consensus perception that Russians are returning in mass, to date this has been propaganda to normalize and encourage mass returns, not actually reflective of mass returns. The Russians are still several hundred million in the hole.
I meant before he consolidated power.
So did I. A significant part of Putin's consolidation of power was via his allies- which almost certainly included parts of the Intelligence apparatus if not also organized crime- going after rivals.
The thing is, after the collapse and botched reforms, Western-oriented political forces in Russia have been dead in the water, and the real question was what flavor of dictatorship would take over. The second most likely one was the Communist party back in power.
I disagree with your premise because where you start the look for alternatives is arbitrary.
Since we're discussing historical possibility, this is where it's simple to point out that there was nothing inevitable of the botched reforms and failure of Western-oriented political forces in Russia. We have multiple counter-examples of other Soviet economic and political systems implementing successful reforms and adopting pro-Western orientation. That the Russians did not is a result of a number of policy decisions- some bad decisions of incompetence/corruption, but also some deliberate ones. What these choices resulted in misses the point that these were choices in and of themselves, with alternative choices with alternative outcomes available.
To pick just one field with substantial impacts to Putin's claim to popularity: a significant part of Putin's early-2000s popularity was reigning in the Oligarchs, but the Oligarchs themselves only were able to arise and have the impact they did due to how the Russians chose to handle the de-Sovietization of the economy and management of the state-owned enterprises. Other Soviet-block countries mitigated / avoided the oligarchic problems due to how they approached it as a legal/policy question.
Dean
8d ago
The unmeasurable concept of popularity is creating a self-referential loop here, which is what avoids the original question. Putin is as popular as he is because he runs personality cult -> Putin runs a personality cult because he was popular -> the propaganda of the personality cult is what creates / proves his popularity. It's not an answer to the earlier question of how popular Putin actually is independent of the suppression state in which anti-popularity factors are squashed.
(One insight would be the result of the Wagner Mutiny. No one joined in on the mutiny against Putin... but there was no mass popular uprising in his favor either. There was no equivalent to, say, Erdogan flooding the streets with his supporters during the failed Turkish coup.)
On the other hand, we could compare Putin's popularity with Russians outside the scope (and reach) of his personality cult. This is primarily Russians abroad, but they do exist as a counter-example of Russians, and Putin is not, shall we say, particularly popular amongst those who are not imbibing on the Russian state-influenced media apparatus. The tendency to murder high-profile dissidents does tend to keep people from wanting to be high-profile, but that's a suppression of dissent, not a popularity, unless the undefined standard of popularity is claiming that people keeping their heads down are actually a sign of popular support.
And it's not like there was much of a substantial alternative to him in particular. His biggest opponent was Primakov, another ex-KGB goon, not exactly someone to expect kindness to dissidents from.
Putin and his backers actively worked/conspired to undercut all substantial alternatives to them in general and him in particular. It's been one of his more consistent strategies over the decades, both domestically and externally.
This is not surprising on the Russian political front- the Security Services were the most capable and coherent survivors of the Cold War and had the best means of coordinating formally and informally for mutual benefit and a common understanding of a better vision that a critical mass could get behind- but this is and was a political consequence of policy decisions, not an inevitability or even a testament to popularity.
It turns out that a one-party state with no meaningful civil society does not have coherent political party groups to fall back on if the uni-party collapses.
Dean
10d ago
Well, the point is that Russia hasn't had any other context basically throughout the entire thousand years it existed,
Sure it has. It had so in living memory, even. The rise of the Putin personality cult and the decision to murder dissidents abroad was a policy decision, not a pre-existing or unavoidable fact of nature.
Dean
11d ago
I mean, a lack of meaningful reliable information doesn't help theory making in a society where it's literally against the law to impugn the good reputation of certain institutions.
What, specifically is Putin's popularity absent the cultural context where various public criticisms can lead one to defenestrate themselves?
Dean
12d ago
I would disagree with your conclusion, and affirm your opening question. I think the variations you see do exist, as Putin runs a personalist system and so his personal foilables show themselves (including his desire for historical reputation, his propensity for aggression when he perceives it as a safe i.e. easy win), but there is a distinction between someone who is pursuing a strategy badly (Putin is, I have asserted for many a year, strategically inept), versus not having a strategy at all.
Putin is in many respects incompetent at various strategic factors, but that's a matter of capability, not intent.
Thanks for providing an infodump. I'm somewhat new here, and I confess that I don't know your position on this whole mess, but you seem like a calm and reasonable person. So I'm going to ask a couple more questions on sensitive topics, in case you still feel like answering. If you don't want to, I completely understand.
Well, I'll let you keep your good opinion a little longer, but I do have my irritation points. But in the spirit of trying to good faith questions-
I've seen a few videos that appear to be of harmless Gazans being shot dead. I don't think they're fakes. What's up with that? And why aren't they viewed as more of a Abu-Ghraib-level scandal by Israelis and supporters of Israel?
One of the dominant trends of Arab/Muslim resistance movements over the last few decades has been a general commitment to blend-end strategies where rather than clearly identifiable uniforms insurgents will wear civilian clothes so they can pass for harmless civilians as soon as they ditch the weapons and adjust their clothes, and one of the trends of this conflict in particular is that Hamas has a strategy of maximizing civilian casualties by various forms. Hamas has a long habit of using human shield strategies in various ways, whether from launching rocket attacks from civilian residences while preventing the civilians from fleeing (so that Israel would be blamed for killing civilians in their homes if they counter-fire) to using civilians as couriers / carriers / observors supporting the armed members, and so on. The purpose of these types of strategies are exploit rules of engagement restricting fires in order to gain asymetric advantages, and to generate/exploit propaganda when the other side shoots back. To be clear- shooting people who appear to be harmless civilians is not actually against the laws of war if they are assisting a belligerant power, and there are tactics to deliberately conflate the categories.
There is no Abu-Ghraib-level scandal because this is a very well established, and not at all novel, tactic, and one which Hamas and the supporters of Hamas regularly acknowledge even as it obviously leads to more risk to civilians who might actually be honest neutrals. The Pro-Palestinian position is that the onus is on the Israelis to distinguish, even as the pro-Israeli position is that the onus is on the Palestinians to not deliberately obfusicate the differences. And given that the Hamas strategy as a whole is to run up the civilian casualty count in order to drive an international response against Israel, and that they will continue to do so, there's no real point to viewing it as a Abu-Ghraib scandal when no amount of Israel discretion will prevent the opportunity for video propaganda to be generated.
Further- and in a broader sense- if you accept that you need to stop a person with a bad practice, you have to be willing to endure the bad practice which the opponent will invoke in order to deter you. This is the classic 'if you are known to succumb to blackmail, your blackmailer will continue to blackmail you' except with civilian collateral. The casualties become scandals more in the contexts of mindsets where Israel is not accepted to have a need/right to stop Hamas that justies tolerating casualties (that Hamas will generate as a matter of strategy).
Note that this makes no claim on the veracity of any videos you may have seen, or whether they are/are not war crimes. However, video propaganda is very easy to generate since the presenter is the one who gets to present context and can remove it via editing or simply lack other perspectives needed for context on specific issues. A X minute video will rarely provide insight as to what happened Y minutes before the video.
I worry that Israeli society has fallen to the level that American society did shortly after Sep 11, where pretty much anything could be justified, and almost no one was willing to dissent. And that parts of the IDF are taking out their anger and frustration in ways that are more about personal vengeance than about any strategic purpose.
The answer to both is yes. This is what happens when major trauma shocks hit a national culture, and this was an expected and intended result of the Hamas attack planning, as the propaganda strategy of, during, and since has been tailored to incite Israeli retaliation.
It seems that factions in Israel supported the initial incarnation of Hamas, decades ago, in order to destabilize the PLO/Fatah. What's your take on that? To me, it seems like either a short-sighted plan that backfired (much like assassinating heads of state, in hopes that whatever replaces them is more controllable), or an extremely cynical ploy to eliminate compromise in favor of the preferred extreme solution. (None of which should be read as relieving Gazans of their ethical responsibility for their own actions.)
I find it unpersuasive.
It is a common refrain that moves agency to the Israelis rather than the Palestinians, a hyperagency versus hypoagency issue where the hyperagent's influence is treated as far more significant than local agent actions reducing them to the role of recipient. It's politically convenient and a sort of emotional cope for Israeli political opponents in the aftermath of a demonstrated lack of control to claim the current situation is actually the result of control by bad leaders, and it's also politically convenient and a form of morality laundering for opponents of Israel in general to claim that the Palestinian actions on 7OCT is really the responsibility of Israel leaders with agency. Agency arguments are a format by which moral responsibility is reduced from the hypoagent not on the basis of their individual morality, but subordinating it to structural paradigms that allocate moral responsibility for hypoagents who, by their nature, have the agency to act.
But the truth is nothing about what the Israels did in that theory dictated the results of 7OCT, or even that Hamas would win the Hamas-PLO power struggle by throwing PLO leaders off skyscrapers after a decisive electoral thumping when Gazan-Palestinians voted out a PLO broadly seen as corrupt and unpopular. There were many, many years of intervening choices, decisions, options, and failures by various actors that were required to reach the point. Selectively choosing to focus on one isn't particularly good analysis, even if it makes for good propaganda, because results and consequences are rarely so clear cut. (To be clear, they sometimes do- Osama Bin Laden directly changed his practices when a US Congressperson said on TV that the US was listening to his phone, which directly led to improved secrecy needed for 9-11, but these are much more often the exception than the norm in multi-agent problems.)
You are also using the much mis-used concept of blowback, which presents negative consequences in present times as a consequence of decisions in the past who are deemed bad because they resulted in negative consequences. However, blowback is banal when treated well, but can quickly become stupid when treated as something to avoid entirely because there is no such thing as major policies with no future costs. That framing of blowback is a bad decision analysis model, because it's retroactive rationalization that assumes clear causality (it judges people on how complex contexts turned out as if they should have known this would happen, when people don't actually make decisions with the benefit of knowing how all future things will unfold), because it negates the relevance of many other factors that contribute to a situation (Hamas was more popular than the PLO in the Gazan elections in part because running on a platform of genocide the jews is popular with the Gazan electorate, and in part because PLO was unpopular due to being corrupt, but not because Israel didn't target it as harshly decades ago- an alteranative genocide-the-jews party would still have had the conditions to succeed), and because it doesn't accept that even good / well justified strategies can deliver significant costs.
Just as a concept, think of strategy games with strategies which allow you to trade health / casualties / debuffs in exchange for potentially advantageous options: the costs and the benefits are both real, and inseparable, but the presence of costs doesn't mean it was an inferior option. You could expect to face equivalent of worse costs. However, pop-culture blowback analysis would be to fixate on the costs tied to the policy, and ignore / pretend that other costs wouldn't have happened if you chose the other options. To pick a video game trope, consider the habit of many players to not use their healing potions in RPGs because they might need it later in a tough boss fight. As a result, they either risk losing in a current fight for not using the resource, or they spend a lot of time grinding so they don't need the resource in the current fight when they could have spent the same time in a later area gaining more XP and better loot if they'd just pushed forward. Blowback analysis is the equivalent of critiquing the players who used the rare potion earlier because they did need one of those later, regardless of if they're in a better position or not (i.e. in an area where rare potions are easier to find with less grind).
To very much simplify how to evaluation policy decisions and strategies, the basis of merit of a choice isn't if bad results occur- it's whether more or worse bad results occur compared to the plausible alternative choices. Note that one of the points of a strategy for dividing the PLO would be so that no single Palestinian faction could cause a two-front war with a single call to uprising... and note that the current conflict is not a two front war. Would this have occurred if the nebulous organization of Hamas was defeated/absorbed into the PLO, creating a stronger for-war wing of the PLO? After the PLO was central Israeli in the first two Intifadas? You can't just assume that if the PLO had successfully absorbed the Hamas-minded parts of Palestinian society, it would have retained the same internal political balances that led to it's current status and avoided all the conflicts that Hamas wanted but it didn't.
To put it in different terms- is the current Gazan War an Israeli strategy failure, for there being a conflict, or a success, for a conflict being far smaller and more manageable than it would otherwise be?
And by similar alternatives: was the surprising success of Oct 7 and terribly delayed Iraeli response a Hamas strategic victory, for doing better than it expected, or was it in fact a strategic disaster, because it failed to ignite the regional conflict that they were aiming for in part due to the nature of the propaganda effect of doing better than expected?
Blowback analysis can't answer either of these, because it treats any blowback as proof of failure (or else it wouldn't be blowback), has no mechanism for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable costs, and no consistency for what it deems blowback to focus on.
Dean
24d ago
It wouldn't be an imposition to them, and in fact they'd probably be thrilled to let you know if they had anything else. Researcher groups like that often love when their research is noticed, and policy-support research in particular loves to know when research they provided can change an opinion. You questions / testimony and reasoning why (concern of male disposability) and what assauged your concern (awareness of Ukrainian views on the subject) would be the sort of thing that might tailor future questions and such.
Do you have links to this polling?
While there's nothing I know of that can't be dismissed if you really want to, this is probably the best / most current public polling that covers this subject.
This is Feb 24 polling conducted by CISR - the Center for Insights in Survey Research- which is the research arm of IRI - the International Republican Institute - which is a non-profit funded by the US government- with this specific research funded by USAID. That does mean it's US-govt funded research, but IRI isn't a US government organ as such- it's actually part of a pair of organizations, with its counterpart being the NDI (National Democratic Institute)- with the board members of each respective organization being drawn from the American Republican and Democratic parties respectively, making it a govt-funded partisan research organization of sorts. That makes it close enough to the US government if you want to insist anything that US government funding touches is propaganda, but it's (a) Republican party propaganda during a period where Republicans as an institution are far from aligned with the US government position on Ukraine, and (b) that's not reason enough to reject all data. The IRI (and similar institutions) may have interests, but they also have an interest in understanding the data to support further policy creation, and aren't exactly organs who present data to drive public policy. Pick fights over the data methodology if you'd like...
...which is described on page 2, with demographics on page 3. Computer-assisted telephonic survey, n = 2000 Ukrainians, nearly 900 men vs 1100 women, response rate of 14% until they got the 2000, etc. etc. Responses are broken down by gender / age, but also by regional breakdowns, but not necessarily gender & age breakdowns. (You'd probably need to request access to the research data directly for more nuanced breakdowns.)
In other words, typical telephonic polling with typical telephonic polling strengths and weaknesses. Sufficiently motivated people will find excuses to reject it, but in lieu of alternative more authoritative polling data, it can serve as a ballpark.
Now for what you're most interested in, go to page 22, 'How do you feel about the current level of mobilization in Ukraine'. (Remember that conscription is functionally synonymous with mobilization as mobilization is just the euphism treadmill for the process provided by conscription.)
If it shows a majority of draft-age Ukrainian men support conscription as implemented, it would probably shift my view of the conflict.
It doesn't show that a majority of Ukrainian men support conscription as implemented- because it actually shows a plurality of Ukrainian men in Ukraine believe there isn't enough conscription (36%) with almost as many believing the current level of mobilization is just right (31%), while only 17% of men believe there is too much.
While there's a notable age bias implicit in that- with about 30% of under-30s (male and female) believing there is too much mobilization compared to 10% of the too-old-for-conscription 60+ pops- even the under-30 bracket is decisively in favor of as-much-or-more mobilization (65% to 29%). The next 3 conscriptable brackets are even more decisively in favor of the current level of mobilization or more, with 'we need more mobilization' increasing as you go up the age bracket, and 'too much mobilization' decreasing as you go older as well.
Does this mean that a majority of Ukrainian men support conscription 'as implemented'? Well, 50-stalins criticism is still criticism. And someone interested in cross-linguistic semantic quibling, there's things you can quibble on.
But there's also an interesting question that was posed, shown on slide 51, which is rather relevant to the conscription-is-unpopular / the most important thing is Ukrainian lives / the West is forcing Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian arguments.
Q: If Ukraine is only able to accomplish one of the following objectives, which do you think is the most important for our country to achieve? "Freezing the conflict at the present lines to stop the loss of more Ukrainian lives" is... 19%.
Which is, admittedly, ahead of full EU membership (11%), but also behind full NATO membership (23%), and less than half (39%) of the dominant answer of what Ukrainians think is the most important objective.
Full-scale war to recapture all lands included in the 1991 borders.
They don't think that's going to be quick or easy, either.
People who think the Ukrainians are war-weary reluctants forced to fight against their will by western powers are woefully unaware. The Ukraine War is a war of nationalism, and the Ukrainians are nuts.
Dean
25d ago
It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?" Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window. It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.
I find it interesting in another direction, such as why you believe it's a foregone conclusion, as opposed to a dismissed propaganda narrative that outran its legs.
We have numbers to use, and the war attrition of the Ukraine War is nowhere near that Ukraine is being attrited to such a degree in population terms. The early-war narratives to that effect required the inclusion of the capture of major demographic centers in the east during the early war and projected that forward, but in the time sense Russia hasn't captured the demographics previously associated with the territory, and the combat attrition rates- even factoring in some of the more incredible Russian claims- are nowhere near enough to warrant a demographic-level narrative. Ukraine may be struggling with the manpower to resist the russian manpower, but that's a balance of scale and desire to mobilize available population, not running out of population.
This also turns on the motte-and-bailey of what negotiating a peaceful end of the conflict entails. The Russian terms from the start of the conflict- including the narrative that the West forced Ukraine to cancel a near-deal- have consistently been terms that were, shall we say, not conducive to a negotiated peaceful end of the conflict, as opposed to obvious set-ups for a fourth continuation war to greater Russian advantage by demanding dismantling of Ukraine's means to resist any future invasion and providing Russia a veto over any external support in case of a future Russian invasion. The Russians have been rather consistent on that front, and have further expanded their claims since, and so it generally falls on the advocates of a negotiating a peaceful end of the conflict as to argue as to how the Russian position is compatible with a negotiated peaceful end of the conflict, which itself was the third unprovoked continuation war in a decade.
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.
Why would you feel it's hellishly dystopian, when it's a positively banal part of the international system and has been for longer than you've been alive? As long as you claim citizenship of Country X, you have reciprocal obligations with country X, and while countries Y-Z often don't go along in enforcing other countries laws regarding those obligations, they often practice similar practices. This ranges from conscription- I've personally met Koreans who left Ivy League colleges to serve their service time- to taxation abroad, to extradition treaties, and so on.
Conscription is not some international abnormality, and neither is it being gender-restricted. If a normality comes off as dystopian, that implies more about the standard of dystopia than the nature.
This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers. Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict? That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
If you lack numbers of draft dodgers to make any judgement on relative numbers, why would you believe the conflict is being sustained by Western pressure as opposed to authentic homegrown opinion? Especially when you already have access to now years of Ukrainian opinion polling by a multitude of actors that go beyond Ukrainian capacity to control?
It's not exactly impossible to do polling in Ukraine without Ukrainian government approval, and the polling efforts that survive scrutiny are generally consistent. Even on conscription, it's not particularly remarkable: individuals don't necessarily like being conscripted, but can accept/support conscriptions as a legitimate and even necessary component of defense.
I'm more curious as to what you think the alleged Western pressure on the Ukrainians to keep fighting is. Typically that refers to the early 2022 breakdown of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, which actors claimed were 'close to agreement', but reporting on actual contents of the negotiations include revealed rather significant gaps in position like-
The draft treaty with Ukraine included banning foreign weapons, “including missile weapons of any type, armed forces and formations.” Moscow wanted Ukraine’s armed forces capped at 85,000 troops, 342 tanks and 519 artillery pieces. Ukrainian negotiators wanted 250,000 troops, 800 tanks and 1,900 artillery pieces, according to the document. Russia wanted to have the range of Ukrainian missiles capped at 40 kilometers (about 25 miles).
And included Russians provisions like-
Other issues remained outstanding, notably what would happen if Ukraine was attacked. Russia wanted all guarantor states to agree on a response, meaning a unified response was unlikely if Russia itself was the aggressor. In case of an attack on Ukraine, Ukrainian negotiators wanted its airspace to then be closed, which would require guarantor states to enforce a no-fly zone, and the provision of weapons by the guarantors, a clause not approved by Russia.
I don't think anyone has seriously argued that refusing terms like these requires external pressure, given the rather logical implications for one's prospects for a peaceful future if the current invader insists that they must agree to any international assistance to you in case they invade again after you dismantle your means to resist.
Given that the current Ukraine War is at least the third continuation war in a decade after the occupation of Crimea (the first continuation war being the NovaRussia campaign that was intended to start a mass uprising, and the second continuation war being the conventional Russian military intervention to preserve the enclaves as separatists when the NovaRussia campaign failed), peace talks really do have to address the prospects of future wars, and not treat the current war as one in isolation. Especially as multiple Russian claims as to why their invasion was justified would retain for future use would not be resolved in any near-term ceasefire.
Dean
25d ago
I've no doubt that people say that, but there's probably a considerable amount of category confusion (do Mujahideen trading Stingers with other Mujahideen count as trading away Stingers?) and self-serving narrative biases (various interests in downplaying the relevance of US military aid support in favor of other actors/other types of aid/denying US significance) and the point that there were only so many (the CIA reportedly only gave around 1000 total), and that once they did their primary role- making the Soviets cautious rather than aggressive with their use of gunships- there wasn't much use for them.
Some weapon systems are more about shifting the opponent's behavior rather than being prevalent. Stingers were an example of that.
Dean
25d ago
Thanks!
Ye are welcome.
I didn't realize it had gotten that bad in the last few decades. I'd assumed that the Israeli left had come up with a different vision, but it sounds like they never did?
There's always going to be different visions, but there's also a reason that Israeli politics over the last several years began to center around removing Netanyahu as an individual than on the security front. Even in that the Left is damaged goods in that while Netanyahu is almost certainly corrupt, there's nothing particularly partisan-unique about it. Olmert, the guy who was PM for 2006-2009 as sort of the last gasp of the Israeli left, was under corruption prosecution and convicted in a prolonged chain of events that lasted until 2017, making that a non-contrast per see.
Ultimately, the Israeli left's different vision on the security front has always been the importance of the Two State solution both as a matter of appropriateness, as an argued necessity for normalizing relations with the rest of the Arab world, and as key to maintaining relations with the West. However, there again history and the right did no favors: Oct 7 dissuades that a truly autonomous Palestinian polity wouldn't use said autonomy to attack, and one of the purposes of Oct 7 was to disrupt the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that Netanyahu was nearly achieving despite the dogma. Which leaves the claim of being necessary to maintain relations with the west, which is a fair bit more contentious and starts going into your perspective of the effectiveness of the Israel lobbying and Palestinian protest movements in the West especially since Oct 7.
I'd heard talk about Netanyahu being unpopular and his coalition being shaky, prior to Oct 7, but from what you say it doesn't seem like there's anything coherent that could replace him? It's just "stomp hard" or "stomp harder"... :-(
Before or after 7 October?
Before 7 October, the argument was (and still is) that Netanyahu was preventing the two state solution from solving the issue, so the alternative was to re-commit to the two state solution process. This was just part of the host of the anti-Netanyahu coalition, which included the 'I'm strong on defense but not as corrupt' alternative, the 'Israel should be more secular' perspective, and so on. But no, there was no particular coherent alternative on, say, the West Bank issue, where the politics and the various military / strategic / ideological rationals for the settlements have their own mass and inertia in Israeli politics, but the left wasn't going to do a unilateral withdrawal after how the much smaller Gaza strip worked out.
After 7 October, the main differentiating question is what to do with the Gaza Strip after anti-Hamas operations conclude, which itself is going to depend on what specific context they conclude under. There is anything from outright military occupation, to turning it back over to the PLO eventually, to a multinational security force to keep the peace. There are downsides to all of these, but I also don't believe there's anything coherent enough to match a left/right divide, not least because it's still not clear what context the war will end in.
Dean
25d ago
I don't know any statistics, but I do remember reading multiple articles to that effect during the Black Lives Matter protests of groups bringing in out-of-state protestors who were regularly playing the role of agitators.
There are absolutely career activist networks as well, generally parts of political machines whose job it is to organize protests using established channels. They're the sort of people who work with the people who do things like bus students to protests. The student isn't necessarily showing up for any given protest, but the network behind the mobilization is regularly being tapped and exercised.
Dean
25d ago
It's kind of an old conventional wisdom at this point, but the basic point is that late last century, the Israeli right and left were significantly divided by the question of how to deal with the Palestinian territories, and the Israeli left was discredited when withdrawal from militarily occupying Gaza led to its takeover and militarization by Hamas, ruining the Israeli-left security policy that peace could be achieved by making unilateral concessions to the Palestinians in the name of peace.
For a more extended version-
When the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in the Six-Day War in 1967, one of the reasons for seizing the territory was both as a military buffer, but also that they could be traded back for peace in the future. This is what happened with the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt, but for various reasons did not happen with the other territories.
Said reasons variously involved the fracturing of Pan-Arabism and the growing divides between the Palestinians and regional Arab states.
During the early cold war pan-arabism was a movement for a common Arab state which even saw some states voluntarily try to associate/join eachother, but ultimately inter-elite disagreements and the shocks of the Arab-Israeli wars fractured that movement to the point that Egypt, which had been one of the leaders of the Pan-Arab movement earlier, refused to take the Gaza Strip when it regained the Sinai as part of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The Egyptian position was that it's refusal was because it had never held Gaza as part of Egypt before the war, but a not-uncommon belief is that this was because Egypt didn't want the trouble of governing gaza / having to deal with the Palestinians / it made a useful thorn in Israel's side.
In the West Bank, Jordan renounced claims to the West Bank (which it had previously annexed) in the aftermath of the Black September civil war, when the PLO (who was present in Israeli-occupied Israel as well as Jordan) attempted to overthrow the King of Jordan in 1970. The Kingdom of Jordan won that, but the PLO remained in the Israeli-occupied territories, and in 1974, the Arab Leage recognized the PLO- and not Jordan- as the sole representative of the Palestinians, and compelled Jordan to recognize a Palestinian independent of Jordan. Jordan would later formally renounce claims in 1988, as part of cutting monetary expenditures and dissolving a lower house of legislature that was half composed of constituencies in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, i.e. Palestinians. Jordan and Israel would go on to establish relations in 1994, without needing any sort of concession of the West Bank back to Jordan, who it had been captured from in the first war.
What this meant is that come the 90s, when the Cold War was ending and there was no US-Soviet context to the middle east conflict, Israel had achieved peace with its immediate neighbors it had conquered Palestinian territory from, without having actually to trade back Palestinian territory as part of the deal. However, this peace between states wasn't the same as peace: the First Intifada at about the 20 year anniversary of the 1967 war in 1987-1990 was years of violence / murders / increased unrest, and it was clear that it could happen again. As a result, Israeli politics shifted to a question of how to resolve the Palestinian issue. This was the... not start, but how the Two State solution took new life in the post-Cold War environment, with the Left and the Right disagreeing on how to approach it, or whether even if it should.
An oversimplification of this is that the Israeli left was vehemently onboard with the two state solution, and more associated with making compromises- or even unilateral concessions- to advance negotiations. The Israeli right was far more skeptical, alternatively wanting terms that would functionally limit Palestinian sovereignty in their own state (no military allowed, right for Israeli incursion against groups attacking from Palestinian soil) or not wanting to have to do it at all. Then there was how settler politics played into both parties, as settlers were both a way to secure territory that might not have to be returned due to changing facts on the ground (the Israeli right), but also a bargaining chip that could be traded away at the negotiating table (the Israeli left), and of course an actor in their own right.
The so-what here is that in the late 90s, the Israeli left had an politically ascendant moment. Prime Minister Ehud Barak of the Labor Party came into office, at the same time that Bill Clinton was still in office, and they were relatively like-minded enough to put together the Camp David Summit... whose failure was one of the triggering events for the Second Intifada. The exact reasons why it failed are subject to dispute / position / your belief on what Yasser Arafat could actually deliver on behalf of the PLO, but from a more common Israeli perspective, this was a sincere effort with politically-damaging offers at the sort of land-swaps that had been a functional base of negotiations for a good while, and it not only failed, but it blew up into another 5 years of violence.
Part of what ended the 5 years of violence was the Israeli-PLO Sharm El Sheikh Summit of 2005, where President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority- the same Abbas still in power today- had assumed power from Arafat. And this was in part because not only had Arafat died in 2004- and so robbed the Palestinian movement of one of its unifying figures- but in 2004 the Israelis had also done a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
While the Second Intifada was a blow to the credibility of the Israeli left, the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is what I'd consider to have been the fatal blow to the Israeli left.
While it was conducted by Ariel Sharon- who at the time was part of the conservative/right-wing Likud party- it was so controversial a policy that Sharon's faction left Likud and established the central-liberal Kadima party, which attracted a number of the Labour party members as well. It was as such a policy that was identified with the left/center-left in spirit and practice, as not only was it's proponents the dominant leftist political force of the era, but it was a quid done for no quo. Israeli infrastructure was left behind, including things like greenhouses, and while for awhile it could have been argued that it set conditions for the cease fire the year after, which probably had something to do with Kadima's victory in 2006 to top the government- i.e. the political reward for ending the Second Intifada through good leftist political wisdom, bravery, and...
...and a year later, in 2007, Hamas completed its takeover of Gaza Strip after its own 2006 electoral victory by throwing PLO officials off of skyscrapers, and began a sustained rocket campaign into Israel. By January 2008, it was up to hundreds of rockets a month. The rocket campaign would more or less go on until the Gaza War of 2009-2010, after which the rockets... never went away, but were more varying, and a constant source of tension and unease. For as bad as the Intifada was, it wasn't that degree of regularity in rocket attacks on a weekly basis.
As a result, in Israeli politics, the Gaza Withdrawal became the political kryptonite of the left, a sort of feckless concession that made things worse. Prime Minister Netanyahu first assumed power in 2009 as a result of running on a tough-on-security policy, and ever since the decades of 1990s and 2000s have been the death knell of the Israeli left. After running and winning on the post-cold-war optimism of the 90s, the ideological basis of the leftest approach to Palestinian negotiation/conciliation was discredited. Not only were perceived-as-sincere offers of trades and concessions not only rejected but answered with an Intifada, but further unilateral concessions to amoliate even that only served to facilitate even more violence by even more dedicated partisans.
The Israeli left, associated with both conciliatory approach to the Palestinians (that visibly failed) and a commitment to a two-state solution lost a political generation as Netanyahu spun in power. In so much as they could define themselves still as an alternative to the right, the Israeli left was still defined by its commitment to a Two State solution, and thus as the respectable political faction that outsiders (like various US administrations) could like and work with...
And Oct 7 has rendered even that an albatross, because arguments for a two-state solution with the people who relished in their own ISIS-level brutality doesn't go down well with the electorate. For all that Netanyahu is unpopular and is unlikely to survive the death of his reputation as an effective security providor, Netanyahu is unpopular as a man. The two state solution is now unpopular as even an idea, and that is practically the most defining distinction of the Israeli left in some circles.
Or so the story goes. Perspectives and recollections may differ.
Dean
26d ago
There's also the point that the US wasn't the biggest funder of the Afghan resistance- the Muslim world was. The US brought the state-of-the-art stingers that negated Russian aviation, but in terms of raw money to pay/feed/supply troops in aggregate, the US was a modest part.
Dean
1mo ago
Among other things-
-Basically no one in the world has as artillery-centric an army as the Russians, and the implications of drones and precision munitions to throttle artillery at scale mean no one else is going to want to due to the logistical throttling they enable. Russia is using artillery in its current fashion to brute-force the offense because that's what it has on hand and can procure the ammo for, not because the artillery is doing more than alternative investments would have. Even Russia post-war is far more likely to focus on drone power expansion and precision munitions than restocking dumb rounds by the billions.
-Drone and aerial siege warfare is atypical because Russia has benefited from a political, not practical, barrier that wouldn't apply in NATO conflicts. The Russians have, for example, benefited greatly from having air-standoff superiority and both in terms of air-delivered munitions and for being able and willing to use drones to target civil infrastructure while their enemies wouldn't. The Russians would not have the former in a NATO conflict, and the later one-sided nature is due to the restrictions NATO countries impose on the Ukrainians, not restrictions NATO countries impose on themselves. A great deal of Russia's economic-destruction warfare siege alternatively would not work (heavy glide bombs) or would not be unilateral advantages in the economic struggle (infrastructure targetting), but it's the 'what worked' of the current generation.
-The current war has underscored the importance of small short wars rather than long large wars to advance the national interest. Russia is continuing the war primarily because Putin made a series of strategic mistakes most countries do not make, and then doubled down on personal reasons. However, even Putin had aimed and intended a small short war, and the contrast to the long, expensive war that has lost Russia a multitude of strategic assets (military and otherwise) will drive home a lesson to planners in Russia and abroad to limit the scope of future conflicts of choice. However, the operational experience of the Russians in Ukraine will be precisely the opposite, as the small-nimble BTGs were destroyed and grinding attritional slog is what was inefficient but effective.
-The nuclear deterrence modeling and level of economic depence between relevant parties is atypical in general. Most conflicts, and most of Russia's more likely conflicts, are not cases where a nuclear-umbrella power is backing a non-nuclear state being invaded by a nuclear power. Most countries also don't have the backers of one party be economically dependent on imports from the opposing belligerent. Both of these factors significantly shaped the Western support for Ukraine, but either of these factors could easily change in both general conflicts and for Russian conflicts in particular (not least because Europe chose a strategic break from the Russian economic dependence).
A more typical conflict with correct lessons would include... probably not doing this at all, but at the very least a more precision-munition dependent strategy, smaller scope and scale, an emphasis on rapid movement rather than trench warfare, and not relying on nuclear/economic deterence against external backers of the opponent.
Then your position makes less sense, and holds even less moral sway, as it becomes even more divorced from any coherent ethical system regarding conflicts.
Why do you think that a fraction of the air strikes in retaliation for the thousands of rocket attacks, as opposed to the ground incursions that have occurred both historically and in most other contexts where one side bombarded another, isn't a de-escalation?
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