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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.
The Israelis have been holding the wolf by the ears for 77 years and it looks like they are shifting the hands to the neck. I understand their position: they sincerely believe than any bargain with the Palestinians will only be a stepping point to the final item on the list:
The real problem is that no one is willing to step up and threaten to glass the country that will violate the peace terms first. This means both Israel and Palestine are completely free to defect, unlike Yugoslavs in B&H.
This is a classic slippery slope fallacy. If you think there are good reasons why, for example, you'd easily slide from bullet point 2 to bullet point 3, please state them. If not, this is a bad argument. Why on earth would a two-state solution, once established 'backslide' into something else? Makes no sense! Much less the Palestinians doing so, because the last 20 years or so it's been Israel, objectively, that has been deliberately trying to move and wiggle the borders more to their liking - so if anyone should be worried about a slippery slope, it's the Palestinians?
Genocide and/or Ethnic Cleansing of Israelis has widespread supermajority public support among Palestinians. So does does destroying America. The extrapolations from such things are not hard.
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But slopes are slippery! It's the literal, physical nature of a slope (and the relationship between static and kinetic friction) that, once you start to move down one, you tend to continue. The argument is, I suppose, that a lot of things people treat like slopes really aren't... but aren't they? I'm struggling to think of a case where a political movement, having achieved its proximal objective, declares victory and goes home. Actually, I'm not just struggling; the idea is absurd. Individuals can do that; amorphous groups never can.
Victory draws interest because everyone loves a winner, and to divide up the spoils -- power, but mostly cachet -- you get purity tests, which rapidly become purity spirals. The intra-group dynamics drive the inter-group dynamics: if you don't keep pushing for more, you get pushed out. This is what we see in real life: victory only emboldens movements, and a couple decades down the line, they're demanding things their forebears' mocked as slippery slope arguments. They reach and reach until, finally, the public's patience runs out... then their opponents get a turn.
(This is just one mechanism. There are others.)
The civil rights movement, the moral majority, the LGBT movement, anti-communism, progressivism, interventionism; just a handful of the many, many examples from recent history.
To put it in concrete terms: obviously bullet point 2 makes bullet point 3 more likely. Well, I very much doubt it'll follow such a clean progression; there's generally more momentum to these things. Palestinians don't exactly hide the fact that a supermajority want the last point; how could letting them organize and regroup not make it more likely? It might still be unlikely -- not like any of the other Arab nations have proven able to enforce their will on Israel -- but I think it's very hard to argue it would become less likely.
But, you argue, isn't Israeli oppression a slippery slope too? If Palestine just lets Israel establish settlements in the West Bank (or whatever), doesn't that just make more thorough depredations more likely? Yes! Both sides accuse the other of starting down a slippery slope, and both are right!
(You frame this as 'backsliding' from the two state solution; because you think it's more fair, presumably? But why would Palestine see it that way? Backsliding would moving towards an Israeli-controlled single state. A Palestinian-controlled single state would, obviously, be continuing to slide forward down the same slope: Palestine achieving it's goals.)
In Germany, the Nazis rose in large part to oppose the communists, who were, at the time, the dominant political force in the country (not in terms of votes, certainly, but in terms of organization and political violence. Which was, after all, their stated path to victory). Then the Nazis, having achieved power, ruthlessly suppressed the communists; they would do the same to them if they got the chance, they said. Which was thoroughly borne out the moment the communists did get the chance!
So how, in this model, can de-escalation ever occur? Well, one side can wipe the other out, either literally or in terms of group membership; this is how the conflict between slave owners and abolitionists ended, for example. But true de-escalation mainly happens when both sides lose, I think. The Good Friday Agreement was a tacit admission from both sides that neither could achieve their full aims. And sometimes, when the swings are too quick and dramatic, the public can simultaneously lose patience with both.
And in-between, specific groups can. This wasn't the group I was looking for, but in 2015 a group called Freedom To Marry shut itself down:
And, proving your point:
Yeah, a real organization with rigid, non-democratic decision making processes can avoid this dynamic, at least so long as those processes hold. Japan's surrender in WWII is instructive, here: There was a cabal of officers who tried to prevent the surrender, but discipline held and they were rebuffed. The difference with amorphous groups is that there's just no one who can do the rebuffing; 'leaders' last only so long as the rest of the movement deigns to listen to them.
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Thanks for the reply. Speaking in general, slippery slopes are tough because as I mentioned, they can be legitimate expressions of cascading effects, or they can be a rhetorically devious tool without a sound foundation. The key differentiator is if you hand-wave the actual progression too much, it effectively functions as a fallacy. Basically, fear-mongering! There are cases where "if you give an inch they'll take a mile" but there are also cases where small changes are catastrophized, so at the end of the day you kind of have to take it case by case.
I do not think that a broad assertion that all politics is a maximalist, existential struggle is accurate as a general worldview, nor a common enough viewpoint to be assumed.
In politics, victory leading to stalling out is actually more common than you might imagine. It's partially related to the idea of "political capital", where there's actually only so much appetite/time/attention/money for change to go around. Not uncommon is the situation where a major change leaves everyone exhausted and further efforts lose their urgency, or even provoke a counter-reaction in a kind of rubber banding effect. Honestly I think it's more fair to say that societies are generally biased towards the status quo, rather than constantly hopping on runaway trains. This is especially true the more lower-d democratic a society is! So clearly Weimar Germany is a bad example. I think people forget that politics is ultimately downstream of the actual opinions of regular people, not the other way around.
So when it comes to Israel-Palestine, a one-state solution would need to be accompanied by a ground-up swell of support and persuasion to co-exist. A two-state solution is almost by its very nature a compromise, and as they say, the best compromise leaves everybody at least a little angry. And didn't you yourself say that true escalation comes when both sides lose? So at least in my eyes, any two state solution, if actually implemented, is definitionally a détente. I will however concede that the higher the violence level, and the more disproportionate the representation, the less moderating influence there is. Again though I would ask the question: would a genuine attempt at a two-state solution, under Israeli-preferred lines, be accomplished via a high degree of force? I think the answer is a clear no, but I'd be interested to hear if you disagree and think it's really a plausible end-state of naked maximalist agenda-seeking by both sides. Furthermore, geographic national boundaries in particular are, historically, way more sticky than you might think. Just look how awkwardly persistent the British and European decided lines are in the Middle East overall, despite their in many cases obvious unsuitability to match the facts on the ground! (I will however concede that I'm not quite aware of anything quite as swiss-cheese as the current scenario of settlements, partitions, and general strangeness that is current Israel (broad definition) and that virtually any 'solution' requires at least some people to relocate in practice, though I assume a halfway equitable solution could be found, ideally with plenty of money)
I don't disagree; you've only got so much energy to care about these things. Not every issue is sufficiently important to sufficiently many people to foster this dynamic.
Not all politics, sure. I'd even grant that there have been times and places where no political questions were treated that way, or at least not at any scale. But though I take the general point, surely Israel/Palestine meets that bar? That's absolutely how people on both sides describe it.
Sure, this is true. I think I'd categorize it as a 'both sides lose' effect: one side lost the election, the other was failed or betrayed by their chosen representative. Actually accomplishing things is hard, so this is a reasonably common outcome. (Appearing to accomplish things is easier, though, and pissing off the other side is easier still; the Trump approach, which has proven very effective in motivating his base.)
A counter-reaction, though, is entirely in line with my theory. The question is whether it truly behaves like a rubber band (in that the oscillation is damped and will eventually stop), or like a swaying top (where the oscillations will only grow until it inevitably falls one way or the other).
This, though, I don't think I agree with. Well, the problem was bad in the Weimar Republic and the Weimar Republic wasn't particularly democratic, but that just means that democracy isn't a necessary condition. To build out the theory a little further, my contention is that you see this dynamic where disorganized (or poorly organized) groups compete over important goals; political parties in democratic countries are an example of this, but so is gang warfare and Israeli settlers/Palestinian terrorists.
But the cases where politics lacks this dynamic seem to me to be the ones where people are least engaged; single party states, effectively single party states (in that the parties don't really disagree on anything important), local politics (though those can be astonishingly vicious at times). Andrew Jackson made America much more democratic, but he certainly didn't reduce polarization.
I suppose I'm not really sure what you mean by how 'democratic' a society is. That regular people hold moderate views? That definitely helps, but I'm not sure what it has to do with democracy. That important questions are resolved via elections? I think that makes it worse. That people believe that important questions should be resolved via elections? Maybe -- it makes escalating to violence less likely, at least. But that's still more or less true of both major parties in America despite their increasing radicalism. I'll grant it's getting less true over time, though.
Ah, well, I think it might be assuming the conclusion to call it a 'solution' (which I did as well), because I don't believe it'd actually end the conflict.
Right now, isn't a two-state solution clearly a win for Palestine? It's not everything they want, but it's far better than (apparently) permanent Israeli occupation. It'd count as a loss for both sides if they credibly committed to abandoning their claim on the rest of Israel, which 1. would, so far as I know, be incredibly unpopular and 2. no one in Palestine currently has the legitimacy to credibly commit to anything. (Plausibly a misstep on Israel's part, but plausibly not; not like those leaders were especially willing to negotiate a reasonable settlement before.)
Without that commitment, a two-state solution is just proof that Palestine's tactics are working, which I believe would only lead to renewed enthusiasm for them, coupled with much greater capacity to carry them out.
Establishing the two-state solution wouldn't require any significant violence; Israel would just need to pull back to the line. I'm not clear on why they'd do that, but they could. If you're asking what it would take, practically speaking, to bring that about, I suppose sufficient international pressure could do it without (first order) violence.
I believe the violence would come after, when Palestine uses its newfound freedom to reorganize and rearm before attacking Israel again. Is there indication Palestine would be satisfied with a two-state solution? There might be, I suppose, but I haven't encountered it.
My position isn't that a two-state solution is the end-state; it's that it's the pendulum swinging the other way; in fact, the middle position is when the pendulum swings the fastest. (Though, given the relative strength of each side, I'm not convinced it is the middle position; Gaza's situation pre-October 7th is probably closer.)
I think this is 1. a relatively recent development and 2. motivated primarily by technological factors. The obsession with keeping borders exactly where they are was borne out of the incredible destruction of WWI and especially WWII -- it's too high a price, and any would-be conqueror needs to be shut down hard so people don't forget it.
In Europe, at least. I'm honestly not too sure why the taboo has (kind of) held in Africa and the Middle East. I suppose the same factors exist there to a lesser extent (in that they're less densely populated than pre-war Europe, and that military technology has actually mostly turned away from mass destruction towards precision over the past half century), and the First Gulf War probably set an example for anyone thinking about it. But that was relatively late in the period in question.
I suppose the fundamental reason is that the British didn't just draw lines on a map; they established governments for each of these new states, and each of those governments had a vested interest in not losing their territory, however little sense it made for them to have it. Defense is generally easier than offense, so it stuck?
As to the messy intermingling of peoples and the resolution thereof: it's worth noting that, when the game of musical chairs stopped in Western Europe post-WWII and the borders were 'fixed,' the Allies additionally engaged in an absolutely massive campaign of ethnic cleansing; putting everyone back where they belonged, you might say. This largely targeted Germans, but it was far from exclusive to them. The fact that those nations are so neatly sorted today is the result of a deliberate, forceful effort that would absolutely be called genocide today.
Was that actually a good idea in spite of the human cost? In retrospect it hardly seems necessary, but mainly because it's hard to imagine Germans and Frenchmen struggling to peacefully coexist, which I imagine was much less hard to believe at the time. I have more mixed feelings about the similar effort accompanying the separation of India and Pakistan, because it's very easy for me to imagine conflict between Muslims and Hindus. Not that there isn't conflict between the two now; separating populations that hate each other likely makes low-level violence less common and outright war more common. Not sure which end of that tradeoff is better.
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If this were happening in a vacuum with no historical context, that might be a good argument. But this situation is all about historical context, and to ignore it to this degree is somewhere between hopelessly naive and wilfully blind.
Nothing about pointing out a slippery slope says we should ignore context, nor did I even imply such (in fact the opposite, maybe you should re-read my comment?). Despite the several snarky answers I've received, no one has yet to say why, conditioned on you having at least semi-successfully reached a two-state solution based on borders drawn by Israel, you'd be highly likely to see the borders change yet again in a way unfavorable to Israel. If you were to reach that point, obviously the major border questions would have been settled already. It just doesn't make sense, and there's no plausible mechanism I can think of. Therefore, it is accurately seen as a slippery slope fallacy. The historical context comes into play when examining the links between the points along the hypothesized slope for plausibility.
The path is "two-state solution" -> "Palestine attacks Israel". This probably just leads right back to where we are now, with Israel and occupied territories, but given sufficient international pressure and a foolish enough Israeli government, it could lead to a land-for-peace deal moving the borders in a manner favorable to the Palestinians.
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Your initial question was:
This is hopelessly naive if you have the slightest familiarity with either side's ideological commitments. No amount of logic-chopping and theorycrafting will make that question not be... well, dumb. The Palestinian side's goal is for Israel to cease to exist.
They probably wouldn't, but that doesn't mean Palestinians would stop trying to accomplish that, or refrain from doing something even worse than 7/10 toward that end. It's clear to anyone paying attention that there's no stable two-state solution in the cards.
Oh my God, no no no no no no no. The only way reaching that point is imaginable is as a temporary and unstable compromise. It is only by pretending it's a theoretical, academic question where historical context doesn't matter that you've managed to talk yourself into thinking otherwise.
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I think that both sides can reasonably claim a fear of a slippery slope.
Have you heard of this obscure group called Hamas? They were kinda big some time ago, and seem really hell-bent to fast forward to the end of the slope where the Jews are drowned in the sea. Do you think that if Palestine was recognized as a state in the borders of 1968, they would think their jihad over and decide to become good neighbors?
And on the Israeli side of things, there are groups who want Jews to settle in the West Banks to establish a permanent Israeli claim to this land. Last time I checked, they were running the Israeli government. If I was a Palestinian, I might reasonably get the impression that they will take the next slice of land rather sooner than later.
Of course there are moderates on both sides, but fear of the extremists seems to be very appropriate.
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Given that every negotiation has failed by one side or the other, and the two sides expect defecting by the other side (and thus have every incentive to defect first and seize initiative) there’s no viable way to have a two-state solution of any type. There are two end states on offer
1). Israel controls all the territory and has enough weaponry to protect its borders and citizens.
2). Israel is dissolved and thus the state reverts back to being the Arab state of Palestine.
3). We keep up intermittent wars until one of those two states is reached.
Given this, the best solution is backing one side to break the stalemate and take over, the quicker tge better. Then once one side or the other loses completely enough to accept they won’t be in the Levant anymore, the conflict ends.
What does this mean in practice? Where do the Palestinians go?
To be honest I don’t have a good answer for that. Obviously they need a country of their own, but I don’t think it can be in the Levant simply because the land area is too small (it’s the size of New Jersey) and the two sides have so little trust and so much homicidal anger that peaceful sharing whether one state or two isn’t going to happen.
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As with Taiwan, this cannot happen, because this would not be a reversion. There never was an Arab state of Palestine. There was an Ottoman province there, and then the British mandate, but no Arab state.
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Regardless of whether or not that is a fallacy, it's what the Israelis sincerely believe, after having all of their previous offers for peace rejected. Now, you can say that they're wrong to believe that way, but to hold any other position in Israel is politically a non-starter.
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