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A couple of weeks ago, the NYT Magazine had a long in-depth article about certain factions of Israeli society who tend toward violence against Palestinians. If you ignore the click-baity title of the article, the body seems mostly descriptive, and like the sort of investigative journalism I want to see more of. It's not an overview of the entire conflict, not about the Palestinians, and mostly not about the many Israelis who don't do this. It focuses on groups connected to Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, and their respective Mafdal-Religioius Zionism and Jewish Power parties, which together have 11.67% (14/120) of seats in the Knesset and got 10.84% of the votes in the last election back in November 2022. (Ignoring the existence of Noam for simplicity.)
The upshot seems to be that there's an active minority of Israelis who are intentionally engaging in hostilities against Palestinians, and who are subverting attempts to mitigate those hostilities. The only comparisons that come to mind are areas where gangs and mafia have hollowed out the state, and the example of the US South after the Civil War, working around Reconstruction. Since the number is at least 10%, we have to assume that they're present at most levels of civil society and the military.
Then there were these tweets from Haaretz, about the IDF command losing control over some units. It didn't sound like full "Apocalypse Now" donkey-slaughtering, but still worrisome.
(And there was the IDF reservist who posted a video which effectively threatened mutiny. Of course, it would be wrong to judge an entire group based on the most extreme thing one of them posted online.)
I've got questions in two main areas.
First, how accurate is all this? This stuff passes my "bounded distrust" filter: it seems plausible from what I know of human nature and society, matches what information I have about conditions in Israel and the settlements, and makes sense of some contradictions I'd been seeing regarding the Gazan war. But I'm hoping that people who know more (@Dean seems like one) will chime in. Maybe I'm suffering from Gell-Mann amnesia.
Second, assuming this is roughly accurate, what the heck does Israel do about it? More generally, how can a state recover when a substantial minority refuses to go along with its orders? As anarchists delight in telling anyone who'll listen, a lot of what we think of as "government" is a consensual hallucination. There's fiction about what happens when people say "I won't" or "mind your own business" or "fuck off", but how often does it happen in real life? If we're supposed to "never give an order that won't be obeyed", where does that leave legitimacy when 10% won't obey certain types of orders? Maybe an Israeli Eliot Ness could put together a modern day group of Untouchables, but (going by vote totals) there's over 500,000 Israelis who at least nominally support this agenda. And the political factions that represent them are in the government coalition.
Not only is this Gell-Mann amnesia, it's the literal ur example of it. You don't trust the NYT when they imply (never outright say) that MAGA republicans want to destroy American democracy, so why do you trust them with the equivalent reporting on another country? Do you understand Israeli politics well enough to know why ~10% of the Israeli population will vote religious-right regardless of who's leading it? Probably not, and it would take actually living here to get it.
The equivalent is if a European would think that 50% of Americans want to turn the US into literal hands-maid tale. It's a not-even-wrong level understanding.
The NYT is a Jewish-dominant newspaper filled with Democrats. Of course they will relentlessly malign Trump, because that helps them. But it’s not so clear that they have an interest in criticizing Israel to the same extent. Especially because there is moneyed interest at stake. No one is withdrawing support for the NYT because of misrepresentation about Trump (it was never there to begin with), but they may for criticism about Israel. As we saw with Ivy League schools and the conspiratorial group chat of Jewish billionaires that WaPo wrote about.
is a meme. Is there any evidence that experts by and large find that the NYT misrepresents findings in their field?
Maybe he does? I hate this idea that only Jews living in Israel have the esoteric moral knowledge regarding Israel. Sorry but you have been a controversial nation for decades, lots of people know how Israeli politics work.
This appears to me to be a nonsensical excuse.
Re: NYT, it’s a stand-in for media in general. I couldn’t care less about the NYT specifically.
Gell-Mann amnesia is exactly what’s on display here. Like it or not, this is a perfect example: trusting a media report about a subject he’s less familiar with, despite already knowing how the media falsely represents subjects he’s closely familiar with.
I know he doesn’t understand Israeli politics by the things he says in the post. Again, thinking that 10% of Israelis want to because they vote for the same party they’ve always voted for is as ridiculous as thinking anyone who votes R wants to strip women of rights, and everyone who votes D wants to trans all the kids. It’s not even surface level understanding, it’s cartoonish thinking.
“You’ve been controversial for decades”, said the people living on lands stolen by genociding the natives and importing slaves. Who cares what you think?
I mean, republicans aren’t stripping women of rights other than the right to have an abortion. The Israeli settlers are forcibly expelling Palestinians.
You say he doesn’t understand the Israeli religious right. I’ll buy that he’s wrong- what is it, then? What’s its place in Israeli politics, its main appeal to voters, strongest policy positions?
You think people vote according to policy positions? Are you new to politics? They vote to the religious-right party because of the type of kippah they wear - knitted. They vote for the party that has an MK that’s a friend of a friend. They vote the same way their dad did. Does that explain it? Is it any different where you’re from?
Basically every republican could tell you a policy reason or two for supporting republicans(abortion, guns, fossil fuel regulations, tax rates); the majority of non-black democrats could as well, although there's definitely more democrats who vote D because that's what dad did and who don't actually know the difference between the parties and african-americans vote democrat because that's how the ethnic-based political machine lines up(a shocking number of them hold actual policy positions closer to a typical republican).
If what you're saying is that Israeli politics is mostly ethnoreligious political machines, that's certainly believable, although it seems like you could have said so earlier in the thread.
I’m being honest in the way people here actually operate, and I don’t think it’s very different to the US. In the states, I get the impression that people vote for whoever they see as less “icky” rather than based on any actual policy positions. I think this is also evidenced by the way your political campaigns are done, normally without touching much on policy and more on personal details on the opposition.
If you want to know the official party line for any party in Israel you can just google it, you don’t need me for it and you won’t learn anything interesting about the world either.
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Not hydroacetylene, but yes, very. I don’t know anyone who decides his vote based on the candidates’ sartorial choices, and I would severely judge anyone would did. I have relatives who are active in both Democratic and Republican politics, and I would find it unimaginable to vote for someone whose policies I disagreed with just because we happened to be friends. Finally, my grandfather is a die-hard Democrat, my parents are both solid Republicans, and I frequently vote third party. Are you really saying that these are all completely foreign patterns to Israelis?
“Knitted kippa” refers to a specific movement in Judaism. It’s like saying that someone votes for a candidate based on the color of his tie - red or blue. Wikipedia is uncharacteristically helpful here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kippah
Re: voting for friend-of-a-friend, you have the causality reversed. They vote for their party, and in their party they are represented. The MKs that end up in the knesset will be friends-of-friends regardless, because they’re part of the same movement. They’ll know a guy who knows a guy through synagogue. Just like I’m a whatsapp message away from e.g. my mayor, or my own party’s MKs. Do you get what I mean by this? It’s a matter of community, not nepotism.
(Also, you don’t vote for a person, you vote for a party ticket)
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Blue dog democrats campaigning in cowboy boots out of the back of a pickup truck is almost a trope at this point, and I'd guess that a knitted kippah is probably the same place in Israeli society- it indicates a certain level of cultural affinity more than simply being a fashion statement.
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It’s generally acknowledged that humans have moved past 19th century norms. We treat natives as fully human now, and most of the globe also considers Palestinians human now too. So the moral questions are significant. And in the article the oppression of Palestinians is considered both factual and significant by none other than —
Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, once head of Israel’s Central Command
Ami Ayalon, head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000
Mark Schwartz, American three-star general, once the top military official working at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021
Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties
These are not exactly renowned antisemites we are talking about. I don’t know anyone more important whose testimony should be heard short of Yahweh appearing on Mt Sinai again with a PowerPoint on his tablet.
To make your defense more explicit, are you arguing that now that you’re done with the genocide, it has become immoral? Was it not immoral in the 19th and 18th centuries, only arbitrarily now when it’s convenient for you?
I get that it's poor form to call out other posters like this, and maybe I'll get punished by the mods, but @coffee_enjoyer is a pretty hardcore Jew-hater*, I wouldn't recommend engaging with him/her for good good-faith takes on anything relating to Jews or Israel.
*This isn't a "boo outgroup" thing btw, I'm pretty sure the poster in question proudly embraces this label.
I don’t mind speaking to actual Nazis, even. I prefer the openness of it really. But thanks for the warning.
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It is poor form - you can note that you know what someone's biases are and that you expect them to have a certain perspective (I have done so myself, because you're not wrong about @coffee_enjoyer) but don't just jump into a conversation to tell someone "Hey, don't waste your time arguing with this guy." It's the same sort of insufferable thing you see everywhere else on the Internet: "Reminder: JK Rowling is a transphobe, Thou Shalt Not Engage with her!" People talking to @coffee_enjoyer can usually figure out for themselves where he's coming from, he doesn't exactly hide it.
Understood, I'll be less snarky in the future. I appreciate the work you guys do.
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“This person’s comments are motivated by pure racial animus” is uncharitable. Were I to say that a Jewish poster who continually defends Israel is motivated by unadulterated racial hatred against Palestinians, and smeared him as an Arab-hater, clearly that would be rule-breaking and I would be banned. Yet there have actually been commenters who have cited the IQ of Jews as reason for why they deserve their illegal territorial conquest.
“Jews” have been a steady culture war issue this year because of Israel and the protests. And because of their over-representation in influential American positions of power, organized Jewish groups have been worthy of discussion for previous years and for years into the future. Since Twitter has become unmoderated it has been shown that normative American discourse includes discussion of the group power dynamics as well. So it is not even a dissident idea anymore.
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I think there are some bad things in the religion, like ethnocentrism.
No more than a Jew who critiques Christian culture is a Christ-hater.
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That’s essentially correct. Morality requires knowledge, so those developments required the moral-scientific realization that humans are equal in regards to basic humanity, and that their primary nature isn’t due to their bloodline. Morality also involves mutually-decided rules of conduct, so nations formed the UN to develop rules on how to treat people (Israel is currently in violation of some UN rules). There was in fact a time when people thought that a slave’s nature was categorically different than a free person’s nature, I think you find that in Aristotle.
Perhaps this highlights the differences between old-style Jewish thought versus new / non-Jewish thought. Traditional Jews believe that God gave them all the rules that they need a long time ago, in the written law of the Torah and in the oral law (despite no evidence of an oral law in pre-first century BC Jewish life). As such there can’t be “moral developments” which hinge on human realization because this would violate a precious dogma.
I don’t think it was knowledge. We stopped supporting slavery once machines were capable of at least somewhat reducing human inputs. A slave thus became less necessary. We stopped thinking of genocide as a viable response to natives once we’d finished taking all the valuables land in the West. Genocide is still on their table because there’s still valuable land to be takin and the natives aren’t yet pacified enough to live next to.
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Oh, did you guys miss “though shalt not murder” back then?
Since you bring up the Bible, I'm not really sure anyone can take the Bible seriously. I mean there are people who say they take it seriously, but generally they cherrypick the things they want to, in order to justify what they want to justify all along. The flip-side of this is, "ha but what about 'thou shalt not murder'" is the exact same tactic, but in the opposite direction: someone cherrypicking one part of the bible in order to justify what they want.
the Bible already sets a precedent that genocide and war is OK, especially if it's the in-group perpetrating it. The moral-scientific realization that humans are equal is not in the Bible and "thou shalt not murder" is not that realization, at all.
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