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Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict. I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better; in particular, I wonder if there are arguments for the Israeli position in the current war that don't mostly rest on one of the following:
An arbitrary cutoff of historical reckoning either shortly before the most recent Hamas attack, or else somewhere in the early '90s following the general Western mode of thinking about other geopolitical conflicts. Unilaterally declaring all scores settled is not a persuasive or universalizable moral principle.
Invocation of inherent superior qualities of Israeli Jews relative to Palestinians, be it intelligence, education or general "civilizedness". You would almost certainly either need to cut out a very contrived set of conditions to make the principle only apply to this case, or accept some hypothetical corollary you probably don't want that involves similar abuse being heaped on morally/intellectually/civilizationally inferior people that you care about or feel kinship to.
The way I see it, the moral case for Palestine is pretty clear, and unlike some seem to assume does not require you to subscribe to a lot of oppressed-are-always-right slave morality (though you do need to stop short of maximally might-makes-right master morality). The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves. I do not think that Palestinians' stupidity or backwardness or whatever are so great that they can't be afforded what we otherwise consider basic human rights to property and safety, even if the people who want to take those from them for themselves were all literal Von Neumanns.
I don't think that this original wrong has been made right to the Palestinians, and the argument that some Palestinians submitted and got to live better lives under the Israelis than they would have had in an independent Palestine does not morally convince me either. If Bill Gates steals the plots some rednecks built their houses on, builds a mansion in its place and then offers them lavish jobs as domestic servants, do the ones who don't accept forfeit their right to complain about the theft? Another counterargument seems to rest on something like statute of limitations (like, the Palestinians and Israelis alive nowadays are not the ones who got robbed and their robbers), which would be more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding, and there weren't still Palestinians who are quite directly being made to suffer at the hands of the Israeli men with guns for no other reason than that they do not accept the "become Bill Gates's domestic servant" deal. It seems pretty clear to me that there is no recourse left to the Palestinians who do not want to to take this deal that preserves their human dignity - their conquerors certainly won't hear them out themselves, and they are backed by the US machine which not only could produce a personal cruise missile for every Palestinian if it put its mind to it but also has enough intellectual and propaganda firepower that they could make even the Palestinians doubt that they are themselves humans with rights.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed. (If you have been driven out of your house and into a corner at gunpoint by the mafia, the mafia boss's kid stands by watching the show and mocking you, and, seeing an opening, you shoot the kid, I will find it hard to fault you for the murder even though the kid is technically innocent of the misfortunes that befell you and this did absolutely nothing to help your situation. As a bonus, the corrupt police (my country) is then called in to arrest you, after sharing a smoke with the mafiosi.)
Though I said that the moral case for Palestine is clear, this is emphatically not to say that I rule out the possibility of a clear moral case for Israel existing at the same time. "They're both justified to continue murdering each other" is a sad reality of a lot of tribal conflict. However, in this particular case, I actually do not even see that case, or at least what I have seen seems much weaker to me, given that Israelis still have the option to leave Israel at any time as a large part of the world would welcome them with open arms (while the anti-Palestinians like reiterating that not even other Muslim countries want to take in the Palestinians, as if that helps their case), and even though in some sense they would also then be "driven from their homes" it's not like they are usually unaware of those homes' provenance.
edit: Thanks for everyone's responses, there were certainly a lot of interesting points to think about there. I'm too overwhelmed with the volume to respond to everyone, though to the extent there were some overlaps between the points I would be grateful if you could check my answers to sibling posts.
I don’t know why you’re assuming that Israel advocates necessarily believe that Palestinian resistance / violence / revenge is “morally wrong”. I certainly don’t. I fully agree that the Palestinians have a ‘right to resist’ settler colonialism (which is what Israel is) to no lesser degree than the American Indians or Australian aboriginals or indigenous Hawaiians did and do.
Nevertheless, part of waging this kind of war ought to be an implicit acceptance of vae victis, of victor’s justice. The Palestinians have waged three failed wars against the Jews. If they are crushed, utterly, if they are oppressed now then that, too, is the law of the jungle. Their honor prevents them from accepting the peace that some other native peoples once did; so be it. The Palestinians are not the first people to be replaced in their corner of the Levant; they may not be the last. So it goes.
Has the original wrong been made right to Native Americans? Remember, “they got a lot of welfare/casino money/etc” is an unsuitable argument according to you (eg. Bill Gates’ servant), and their participation in democracy (ie the right to vote/US citizenship) is also laughably insufficient given their tiny minority status at 2% of the population means that they are effectively under permanent rule by Europeans and other settlers, and have next to no say in national politics.
The truth is that Churchill was right about settler colonialism. It is the law of the universe, it is no moral harm. The perverse thing is not population replacement, which is historically commonplace, it is the replacement of a successful, high performing population with a less successful, lower performing one. You seemingly consider this argument illegitimate; it is not. Is it wrong for Donald Trump to support Norwegians migrating to the US but oppose Somalis doing so? I don’t think so.
I find it difficult to square such a blanket "right to resist" with moral demands that immigration be considered an unalloyed good. I personally don't have a strong opinion in either direction on the issue, but I worry if progressives can't define a coherent reason why violent opposition to [Jewish] refugees fleeing political violence and warfare in 1948 to the Promised Land is acceptable, but opposition to asylum seekers at fleeing political violence and warfare to the Economic Promised Land (America) is completely unjustifiable, then we'll end up with some worse-than-Trump rightist candidate running on a platform of "based 1948 Palestinian immigration policy: more machine guns at the Southern Border" that could be difficult to argue against. And while you can point to how the violence up to and after '48 has been, to a nontrivial extent, mutual, I'm sure populists can drum up enough examples of "immigrants driving up rent, leading to state-sanctioned violence in the form of evictions" or just "immigrant does violent crime" to sway more people than I'm comfortable with. If there is a blanket "right to resist", should that not apply to the Klan's Reconstruction-era actions against Carpetbaggers and Catholic immigrants?
It's not a good platform, and I don't endorse it, but there needs to be a more clear moral principle than "кто, кого?". I don't have a particular line in mind, and I do personally find examples in history where resistance seems justified (I can't really fault the Plains Indians for taking umbrage at westward settlements, or Ukraine's right to defend its internationally-recognized borders), and others where it's not (see the Klan example above), and quite a few more morally ambiguous examples: how many newly-independent nations have used their first autonomous actions to engage in ethnic cleansing their colonial powers were forestalling?
I'm quite willing to listen to other suggestions, but from where I sit, the clearest line seems to be to favor generic liberal pluralism and peaceful coexistence, which probably betrays my most common sentiment on the issue, with an acknowledgement that all states fall short of the platonic ideal there.
I’m a conservative and fundamentally don’t think that immigration is an unalloyed good.
Yes, anti-Catholic activists like Lewis Levin were completely correct that large scale Catholic immigration irreparably damaged America. Men like Philip Hart and Ted Kennedy are in substantial part responsible for a lot of the negative consequences mass immigration has had on the US. I don’t consider any of this a particular topic of dispute.
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