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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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Let's talk about Israel and Palestine.

Okay, I can hear you sighing already. But before you look away, let's talk about Clausewitz.

War is a continuation of politics by other means. In our ideological age, where everything is political, it may not seem profound: but it establishes a commonality between the military and civilian where analogies can be made. Like, 'what if we have no ability to fight a war, but continue it anyway?' Could we just... filibuster, our enemies, until they give us the political ends we desire?

This concept is similar to the Trotskyite concept of 'no war, no peace'. (That the policy ended in disaster and Brest-Litovsk bodes ill.) In the Clausewitzian model, war is conducted between states. The loser gives concessions to the winner, with the assumption that even a bad peace is better than a bad war, that ending hostilities - even for the moment - is the best way to bring about revanchist policy.

The differential between Palestine and Israel in terms of military capacity is greater than ever: it was never at par, even in 1948. Seventy-five years later and the Arabs might as well be Ewoks against the Empire. Not to say that they lack the capacity to harm the Israelis, but they have no military capacity to enforce political goals on their enemy. Even now, their demands for a ceasefire are entirely one sided: they are simply outmatched in every conceivable military dimension.

There exists a hope in the Palestinian cause, that there will be a tipping point where they can present to the international community of some Israeli atrocity that will bring about a external intervention. It is the only card they have to play. But now that Israel has control of the food aid that goes into Gaza with the ousting of UNWRA, time is no longer on their side. Their enemy will never consent to a return to the former status quo, no matter how urgently the international community chastises them.

Not coming to terms and holding on for maximalist goals may seem like a cheat in insurgency warfare. But inevitably, reality and physical limits intrude onto the nationalist fantasy. It is chutzpah of the highest order to rely on the charity and good will of your enemy to feed your people. This conflict - indefinitely sustained by Soviet leftist dregs of the anti-colonialist cause - will come to an end not through some master stroke of diplomacy, but a famine long in the making.

Hamas sought to use international sympathy as a weapon, relying on the services provided by American and European NGOs so that they could devote all the funds they neglected to invest in their civilians into their military. Now that military is destroyed, they have no leverage at all. The Israelis are not bluffing. They will not give in, no matter what the pressure. They are perfectly willing to watch Gaza starve until some entity comes out of the territory that they can negotiate with.

As Calgacus would say, "They make a desert and call it peace." Modern problems require Roman solutions. The fatal Palestinian mistake was that they always assumed Israel would come to the negotiating table. After fifty years of fruitless negotiation, the Israelis finally have had enough. There will be no more deals, no more bargains. Just the short, terminal drop to destruction.

Modern problems require Roman solutions.

You can't read history without coming across the names of long extinct tribes. It might be an exaggeration to say they were all genocided, many merely had their cultural identity destroyed through enslavement and conquest. All the same, there are no Etruscans, Gauls, Picts, Carthaginians, Trojans, and probably countless tribes, states and empires in regions without a written history. Imagine, for a moment, if they were all still among us, waging their 2000 year old grievances over minuscule patches of barren land the way Israel and Palestine are. Imagine if we were still arbitrating between extant Etruscans and Romans possession of the land north of the Tiber over a 3000 year history?

I won't claim some ability to arbitrate when, where or why genocide is necessary. But if you really think of a world without it, it's terrifying.

The etruscans and Gauls disappeared because they started going by ‘Romans’. It’s not an option for the Palestinians to become Israelis.

Yes it is? There's a sizeable Israeli Arab population. Cease the nonsense and they'd be better off

If every Gazan and inhabitant of the West Bank became a full citizen of Israel, there would no longer be a guarantee of a Jewish Israeli PM or President or majority in the Knesset.

There are currently 7 million Jews and 2.5 million others with Israeli citizenship. There are about 2 million Gazans and 2.7 million West Bank-ians. Add them in and give them voting power and suddenly there is a substantial non-Jewish voting block. (And then the wolves eat the lambs.)

It's one of those things everyone knows but not a lot of people make the point to explain. The Jewish Ethnostate depends on not integrating these people, or at the very least, integrating slowly.

They could, however, be called "Egyptians" with no major disruption to that polity, which many of them, or their ancestors, once were. The reason this doesn't happen is because having rump "Palestinians" as a grievance group is an intentional tactic.

They could, however, be called "Egyptians" with no major disruption to that polity

They have been accepted into other Arab countries. I don't think it went with "no major disruption".

That offer is not in the pipeline for the Palestinians.

It might be an exaggeration to say they were all genocided, many merely had their cultural identity destroyed through enslavement and conquest.

You win the prize! You are the 3rd person in this thread to tell me something I already know and said! Have a star.

The etruscans predominately were not enslaved and conquered, they joined Rome as Allies like other italic peoples. And while the Gauls were conquered, the majority of the population remained intact and Gallic-speaking until after the edict of Caracalla granted them citizenship.

The etruscans predominately were not enslaved and conquered

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%E2%80%93Etruscan_Wars

Rome was the eventual victor in the wars and the last Etruscan resistance was crushed in 264 BC when Volsinii was destroyed after a slave revolt. The Etruscans were assimilated into Roman culture and Rome became one of the Mediterranean superpowers amongst the Greeks and the Carthaginians, though the Etruscan language survived for another 300 years (until the early first century AD).

Maybe you have some rosy ideas about what iron age "assimilation" looked like. But coming from the civilization that made "Vae Victus" a household phrase, I doubt it resembled an American "Melting Pot" too closely. I think it's safe to say they were conquered and had their cultural identity destroyed.

246 BC is emphatically not the iron age. Rome as a civilization famously did not require all conquered peoples to become culturally Roman so long as they colored within the lines.

You're missing the point about how conflicts actually happen and how tension propagates. Very, very few people are actually motivated by what happened 2000 years ago. Basically no one is acting out those kind of grudges, and it's ludicrous to suggest such, and equally ludicrous to be... grateful for past cultural and identarian destruction? There's this thing, which is real, which is called a cycle of violence, and part of how that happens is more immediate concerns always foreshadow old ones. Insofar as longer term tension exists, it's quite often intimately related to structural tensions of a more practical nature. Sure, cultures sometimes get into beef with each other over small stuff, but those beefs are always centered in the now or recent past, not the ancient past. In fact I struggle to think of any examples where 100+ year fights recur over something of equivalent negligible value like "miniscule patches of barren land".

Not to be pedantic, but here

https://theconversation.com/what-cattle-conflicts-say-about-identity-in-south-sudan-181637

Its not even permanent land its basically nomadic pastoralists raiding as has been their tradition for centuries.

Perhaps that still counts as economic necessity, but it is a choice to engage in primitive cattle herding instead of pivoting societally to productive economies. Raiding and conflict is a manifestation of intractable differences between cultures, not the cause. Bedouins are seizing on the opportunity to assault Druze with a cassus belli, not that they were content to live in peace absent external influence. Uncorking Libya resulted in Tobruk and Tripoli creating competing clan based governments immediately. Right NOW the Cambodians are assaulting the Thais over a dead temple region and the Thais are eager for a scrap due to insane local politics (tldr Thaksin clan and the royal/military both benefit from conflict specifically against the Cambodians).

There are plenty of people who WANT to exterminate their culturally distant geographic proximates. The issue is whether a unifying culture can supersede underlying cultural distances. The unifying project of "never again" has provided a stable shell for Franco-German-Anglo relations to stabilize, but this is an aberration facilitated only by tangible outcomes. If the overculture fails to deliver, guillotines follow. And we live in an era where the major cultural touchstones are torn down with no functional replacement ethos. Neoliberalism and neoconservatism were destroyed by MAGA and progressivism, but annihilating the Protestant-Calvinist northeastern spine along with the neolib/con framings leaves the USA with a much more fractured cultural landscape.

2000 year old grievances

There was no conflict until, at the earliest, 140 years ago. Praytell, what "2000 year old grievances" do the Palestinians harbor and wage war over?

Given that Arabic lacks the hard 'P' sound, while the Romans called the area Palestine (and the people have adopted that name in English), in Arabic it comes out sounding a lot like 'Philistine' (which is probably where Rome got the name), a reference to the tribe that frequently warred with the Israelites of the Bible (mostly post-Torah).

I'm not qualified to speak to the the actual ethnic histories on the ground, but "the Israelites and Philistines are going at it again" is a tale as old as David and Samson, which is probably closer to 3000 years. Arguably, modern peoples have decided to adopt the mantle of such an ancient conflict, but they clearly aren't doing it ironically.

I thought there was some scholarly hypothesis that the Philistines were Mycenean Greeks, which helps explain certain things like Samson being a more Herakles-type hero, instead of the more typical "Mouthpiece of God" prophet in the Old Testament.

I suppose that it is possible that the Philistines or their descendants Arabized, but I'd want to see the account of that survival since the connection seems a little dubious to me.

Everyone in the region first Aramaized, then Hellenized, then(Jews excepted) Arabized. Palestinians having some Philistine blood wouldn't be surprising, even if I suspect it's mostly Bedouin and Caananite.

then(Jews excepted) Arabized

Why except them? Palestinians are genetically more Jewish than Ashkenazi Israelis, so while they have some Arab admixture, they are mostly Arabized Jews.

The Arabs and Arabic didn't enter the Levant at scale until the Muslim conquest in the 7th century, right?

"Philistine" comes from Hebrew, originally. If you didn't know, Hebrew is also a Semitic language.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/Philistine

My understanding is that the genetics of Palestinian/Levantine Arabs and ethnic groups that predate the Muslim invasion differ, but there's a lot of admixture due to conversions to Islam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Palestinians

Long story short, "Palestinians" are not "Philistines" even though it's the same label.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines#:~:text=Philistines%20(Hebrew%3A%20%D7%A4%D6%B0%D6%BC%D7%9C%D6%B4%D7%A9%D6%B0%D7%81%D7%AA%D6%B4%D6%BC%D7%99%D7%9D%2C%20romanized,generally%20referred%20to%20as%20Philistia.

there are no Etruscans

That the Etruscans were assimilated into the Roman Republic is a matter of historical record.

Gauls

The French consider themselves to be Gauls.

Picts

Controversial in Scotland, to say the least

Carthaginians

I'll give you that one.

Trojans

If we go with schoolboy history, the Romans disagreed. If we go with modern archaeology, Troy was continuously inhabited from the Neolithic through to Roman times, and the Bronze Age Collapse hit Troy after Mycenae, meaning that the Iliad story of "Troy was destroyed by a Mycenae-led Greek army in the late Bronze Age" is proven false.

Deliberate genocide happens, but it is the exception and not the rule.

Good luck finding the forest.

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