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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19925 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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Two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead late yesterday night as they were walking just outside the Capitol Jewish Museum. The Capitol Police have identified the suspect as one Elias Rodriguez of Chicago. Reportedly, Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine” as he executed the couple, who were engaged to be married.

I have been meaning to write a “Civil War vibe-check” top-level post. My intuition was that the danger of such a nightmare scenario was receding, having peaked twice, with the mass-shooting at the Congressional baseball team practice game, and the George Floyd Riot/January Sixth Riot forming a stockbroker’s double blow-off top before a consistent decline in risk.

Recently multiple events have made me question this. The Zizian cult killings, the suicide bombing in Palm Springs over the weekend, and now this, make me feel like something is perhaps coming. Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.

Apparently his manifesto is here: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-israel-embassy-shooter-manifesto

A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn't exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.

I suppose for context, here’s something published in Haaretz-Israel yesterday (auto translated): https://archive.md/yI4Dy

In the eyes of Israeli-Jews from all walks of life, thirsting for a "solution" to the Palestinian problem, a survey conducted in March, which sought to examine a series of "impolite" questions, whose place we would not recognize in surveys that are regularly conducted in Israel, shows this. The survey was conducted by one of the HMs at the request of Penn State University, among 1,005 respondents who constitute a representative sample of the Jewish population in Israel. To the question "Do you support the claim that the IDF, when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, that is, kill all its inhabitants?" 47% of all respondents responded in the affirmative. 65% of those surveyed responded that there is a contemporary incarnation of Amalek, and of these, 93% responded that the commandment to wipe out the memory of Amalek is also relevant to that modern-day Amalek.

About two months ago, Supreme Court Justice David Mintz rejected the petition of the "Gisha" organization to oblige Israel to ensure the supply of humanitarian aid to the Strip, stating that this is a "biblical war of commandment," and in effect authorized the denial of food, water, and medicine to millions of Gazans. The ruling by Mintz, a resident of the Dolev settlement, who was joined by President Yitzhak Amit and Judge Noam Solberg, from the Alon Shvut settlement, is already taking its toll.

Researchers of the education system point to a sharp shift in the nationalist, ethnocentric direction in the curriculum since the second intifada, and this process has led to high support for deportation and extermination, especially among those who completed their studies in the last 20 years. 66% of those aged 40 and under support the deportation of Arab citizens of Israel, and 58% want to see the IDF do what Joshua did in Jericho

To the question "Do you support the claim that the IDF, when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, that is, kill all its inhabitants?" 47% of all respondents responded in the affirmative.

If the population of Gaza were polled on October the 8th, 2023 on the same question (with regards to a conquering Arab army entering Israel), I wonder what they would have said? I suspect that the percentage would have been higher than 47%, and indeed on the previous day, almost every Israel Jewish civilian they encountered who did not successfully flee was either killed or captured to ransom for their own prisoners.

There is wisdom to the most famous adage about revenge. I am on record here as saying that I suspect Israel’s founding in its current location, fated as it was, is the most likely cause of its eventual undoing, which is likely to be far more brutal, more horrific and more violent than the conflict since 1947 so far.

But if an Israeli says “well, the Arabs would do the same or worse to us if they had the whip hand” he speaks the truth, and he does so without persuasive counter-argument. This is what people in this part of the world do. When you move to Arabia, when you become indigenous, when you believe it…well, thats why it’s called going native.

The gap in this thinking is where Americans are obligated to support Israel as the modern, moral, side of the conflict.

If this were an African conflict I was just being introduced to by an Economist podcast today, I'd tend to say let's stay out of it, they both seem like evil groups.

If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.

If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.

I mean, if Israel gets fewer precision munitions from America, that just means they'll have to use things that have a higher error ratio/cause more collateral damage. And if the Iron Dome and other missile defense systems get depleted, they'll be forced into greater offensive action. I think Israel will still come out alright, but everyone in the region including Israel will have a worse time of it than otherwise.

They've already been bombing Gaza intensively, that's not what a precision air campaign looks like.

Israel just isn't a big country. They don't have the resources to engage in constant wars with a much larger bloc without US subsidies and support. Cut the military aid and they'll have to come to the negotiating table for the first time, as opposed to the old status quo of 'US proposes a treaty where Israel gets everything they want and calls it a balanced, fair deal'.

What is Israel supposed to do against the Houthis? Israel doesn't have any navy worth caring about. The US navy, bigger and better in every way, has proven totally unsuccessful at beating the Houthis or bombing them into submission. They can just fire off missile after missile at Israeli airports and airlines won't fly there for insurance reasons. Israel's high-tech economy will shrivel up and die.

At the end of the day, they're a fundamentally small power with a foreign policy that presupposes access to vast resources that don't actually belong to them. Pakistan has nukes too, Iran probably does. They're hugely outnumbered. Israel needs to get more realistic in their aspirations. They can't escalate out of this.

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