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Another day, another controversy about what is antisemitism and what is legitimate criticism of Israel.
This time, a German architecture prize was rescinded over the recipient signing a letter condemning Israel.
Of course, the Guardian is not quite sure how the founder of the prize is called, oscillating between Schelling and Schilling:
The letter in question is here. Key passages:
We still have 3/4 of that century to go, but good job being optimistic!
This would at least be debatable.
Fair enough.
That would be the the general right self-determination of peoples, as mentioned in the UN charter? Does this also apply to the Uighur, the Kurds, the Basques, the Catalans and so on?
Or is the relevant law the limited recognition of Palestine, or the Oslo Accords?
Was the Hamas rule before the Oct 7 a shining example of self-determination?
Personally, I am somewhat sympathetic to calls to stop the IDF from bombing the hell out of Gaza. I am also fine with demanding that Israel should stick to the Oslo accords in the West Bank and dismantle their illegal settlements.
But to demand political autonomy in the context of Gaza is where I get off the train. The force of political autonomy in Gaza is called Hamas. Their primary objective is to sabotage any peace process by murdering random residents of Israel. Asking for political autonomy for Gaza is like asking for political autonomy for Germany in 1946.
Overall, I don't think that the letter is plainly antisemitic. If the author had signed a similar pledge against Chinese institutions for the Uighur genocide, and also demanded self-determination for the Kurds, I would tend to call them a general advocate for oppressed people. If their only political topic is Israel, then that would be a bit dubious.
If, as the right (persuasively) argues, it is racist towards Anglos / French / Germans to flood these countries with migrants, ending their former status as (de facto) ethnostates, then opposition to Israel as a Jewish state is likewise antisemitic. The destruction of Japan by the arrival of a hundred million of the kind of tribesmen who lived there before the ancestors of the Yamato immigrated would be likewise transparently anti-Japanese behavior. I have no opinions on German policy in this area or the awarding of the prize. Nevertheless, advocating a people should no longer be a majority in their sole ethnostate is damning them in a way, whether it’s done to Gauls or Greeks, to Swedes or Serbs, and so on. The Arabs still have many homelands and there was no distinct Palestinian identity before Israeli independence.
Out of these examples, the flooding of Japan by hundreds of millions of, let's say, cloned Ainu and the surrender of Israeli territory to Palestinian Arabs are the two that strike me as different and more justifiable, and I suspect that I may not be alone in that view.
It's not hard to come up with a fairly coherent principle that rationalises this pattern: if your homeland gets seized by another people, your people get a perpetual moral claim to reconquer it from the people that seized it, but not from anyone else that may further seize it from those people and thus has not perpetrated a direct injustice against you and yours. This way, the German/French/... claim against Arabs is live; the Arab claim against Israelis is live; the Jomon claim against Yayoi Japan is, somewhat surprisingly, still live; but the Israelis only have a claim to the Levant against the Romans who scattered them, which is long dead.
Under this framework, in fact, the Jews have a much more plausible claim against the various peoples of Europe who expelled them (especially, if you want to appy the "invader" framework to their whole history, where they settled on lands that changed hands to some entity that was later cut down to size by someone else). This agrees with my long-standing intuition that after WWII a Jewish State should actually have been carved out of the losing nations in Europe (which I remember @Southkraut taking great offense at for reasons that still strike me as insufficiently thought through; imagine the different trajectory many things could have taken had Germany been allowed to discharge its blood debt with soil in this way).
This is only coherent if you set the clock at a completely arbitrary cutoff and commit to ignoring the fact that nearly every slice of land on the planet has changed hands numerous times. The “Germans” are only considered a coherent people now, in hindsight, as a result of millennia of mutually-hostile civilizations slaughtering each other. Why do “the Germans” have a legitimate claim against “the Arabs”, but the Western Hunter-Gatherers of 20,000 years ago (themselves certainly not a unified ethnic group) do not have a permanent claim against any descendants of Neolithic Farmers and/or Proto-Indo-European pastoralists?
Only semi-arbitrary. We cut it off post-WWII because that's when we realised that the seizure of territory by force of arms was increasingly damaging, and thus could not be allowed to continue in the future. Thus we set the cut-off at 'now' as a Schelling point, because we had to set it somewhere, and 'now' was the least disruptive.
No, that's when the American Empire completed its conquest of most of the world, and as the sovereign thus deny lesser/client states the right to wage war on neighboring states. There are 5 countries with the de facto right to do this and 2 of them (Britain and France) are mostly just US vassals at this point anyway.
The Americans and the Russians are in a hot proxy war right now. "We" is clearly just self-serving American bullshit, something they inherited from the English; the "all wars are defensive" stance, by contrast, is straight out of the Roman Republic.
Eh? When did the Brits wage war on a neighbour post WW2? I assume you’re not talking about rearguard colonial stuff in the late 40s.
Brits tried it with Suez (until being politely reminded that the only power they had was at the US’ pleasure for anti-Soviet reasons- Argentina was a gimme though), and then there’s the French in Indochina and, importantly, Vietnam.
And regionally, they’re still relatively powerful, as Libya found out in the early 2010s. But they don’t have the power they used to before the European Civil Wars.
Right. Britain clearly does not have the power to make war on neighbouring (ie European) states, which is why it confuses me so much that OP claims otherwise. Argentina was purely defensive: the settlements are British and have been for centuries.
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