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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27483 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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The "completely unruly" part is doing the heavy lifting here. The only reason Hamas and the broader Palestinian movement keeps waging its pointless self-destructive war against Israel is because of its quixotic belief that Israel could ever be defeated militarily. As Richard Hanania argues, Israel must crush Palestinian hopes. If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests. If Israel can achieve a durable peace in the region without having to resort to genocide or ethnic cleansing, I'm sure they'd vastly prefer that over the alternative.

If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests.

There won't be a current generation, they'll be dead before they can leave infanthood. And any who do survive will have learned: you don't have a place here. Israel wants you gone. Not even toleration, they intend to take this land and give it to their people.

You and Hanania are telling the Warsaw Ghetto to just play nice with the German government, then it'll all be okay once they have total rule.

they'll be dead before they can leave infanthood

Are you predicting that literally no Palestinian children in Gaza will survive to adulthood?

If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests.

I think that 1) that is totally true and 2) this is profoundly unlikely given the long history of these two peoples and human nature to say "fuck you don't tell me what to do" with a side helping of Isreal being unable to keep its hands to itself re: settlements, etc

We shall see!

I have no idea whether it's a plausible outcome. But it does have precedent in living memory, namely the post-war American occupations of Germany and (especially) Japan. It's not completely outside the realm of possibility.

That's true

Less of a long painful history though.

Also both Germany and Japan had much better cultural scaffolding for bootstrapping back into friendly productive 20th century neighbors.

I would be inclined to agree with you and others as far as peace goes but this is ignoring expansionist ambitions of Israel. Israel wants land occupied by Palestinians. All Palestinians have to do on that front is not leave. To that extent they can win battles and drag the conflict towards a stalemate of sorts.

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