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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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If the Palestinians can give up on the pipe dream of driving the jews into the sea then a two or three state solution where both peoples prosper is totally possible. It's essentially the direction Trump's plan pushes things. What you're asking for is a near equivalent to demands all non-native americans leave turtle island and go back to the countries of their ethnic origin, justice by some tortured ethic but simply not going to happen and the sooner the fantasy is dispensed with the sooner real solutions can be tried.

I'm sorry, the Israelis are not going to lay down and let themselves all be killed or expelled from what they believe to be their homeland. If your plan is for them to do that then you need to come up with another plan.

There is no realistic two state solution that does not involve ethnic cleansing of Arabs and Jews both. The remaining areas allotted and allowed to Palestinians are so marginal and split up by settlers that there is no contiguous state possible without expelling large numbers of Jews. Otherwise a Palestinian state is unworkable and unviable, certainly not prosperous.

A one state solution is the only non-genocidal solution on offer. Recognize Palestine all they want, the West will lack the stomach to murder the Jewish settlers who drive wedges through any possible Palestine.

A one state solution is plainly genocidal, once you count up numbers and birthrates.

My impression was that the pure Jewish birth rate was actually stronger than the Israeli Arab birthrate these days, though then you zoom in closer and it gets into different categories of Jew, though then there's an intra Jewish genocide question, idk it all gets pretty complicated and I'm not sure what we're talking about at a certain point.

But there's no viable contiguous Palestinian state that can be drawn without evicting large numbers of Jews, who show no evidence of wanting to go peacefully. The resources and transit aren't there. You can make a retarded botched abortion of a statelet, but I'm not sure that will really solve the problem anymore.

So you're left with somebody getting kicked out of the place they live.

My impression was that the pure Jewish birth rate was actually stronger than the Israeli Arab birthrate these days, though then you zoom in closer and it gets into different categories of Jew, though then there's an intra Jewish genocide question, idk it all gets pretty complicated and I'm not sure what we're talking about at a certain point.

Doesn't matter, though, incorporate the Gazans and West Bank Palestinians and the equation shifts to their side completely.

But there's no viable contiguous Palestinian state that can be drawn without evicting large numbers of Jews, who show no evidence of wanting to go peacefully. The resources and transit aren't there. You can make a retarded botched abortion of a statelet, but I'm not sure that will really solve the problem anymore.

I'm fairly sure the intended solution rhymes with "ass raves".

There is no realistic two state solution that does not involve ethnic cleansing of Arabs and Jews both. The remaining areas allotted and allowed to Palestinians are so marginal and split up by settlers that there is no contiguous state possible without expelling large numbers of Jews. Otherwise a Palestinian state is unworkable and unviable, certainly not prosperous.

The term for this when it's done as a deal and mutually agreed upon is population transfers and has been done successfully in the past in other contexts. Realistically there would be a Gaza and separate west bank state. The west bank would ideally just have jewish citizens if they don't want to transfer back to Israel although in practice I expect most of them to.

Where has it been done successfully and without significant atrocities performed?

People mostly point to Europe, while ignoring the significant violent ethnic cleansing operations against Germans et al post WWII, and the whole context of WWII preceding it, and the EU framework that followed. India-Pakistan certainly wasn't peacefully, and still not entirely successfully. So, where?

Where has it been done successfully and without significant atrocities performed?

The partition of Czechoslovakia?

Notably, Czechs and Slovaks retain the right of return, or just free travel, through each other's countries.

For about as central an example as there could be Israel already executed a population transfer of their settlements in gaza, in your formulation would you refer to that as an ethnic cleansing? Perhaps but it does seem like this is a weaponization of the term to slime non-central examples with greater atrocities. Other exchanges include the Greco-Bulgarian, Greco-Turkish and Cyprus exchanges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide?wprov=sfti1

I'll confess to knowing nothing about the Bulgarian case, and I'm not going to insult you by immediately researching it as pretending to. But the Turkish-Greek split was not without atrocities on either side.

Those are the events that preceded the transfer. The transfer itself was relatively peaceful and successfully ended these hostilities. If there are population transfers in the west bank in 2030 then it would be dishonest to cite the deaths in the Gaza war as being caused by the population transfer.

Sure and that's reasonable. But the situation in the West Bank is also completely unique and completely untenable long term. If Israel could agree on some sort of border it would work better. But they want the land and not the people and most of the West Bank is essentially fully integrated into Israel ignoring the blobs of Palestinian towns throughout. If Israel drew a line and declared one part Palestine and one part Israel I think they'd get reasonable far many countries have disputed borders. But the West Bank is a millstone around their neck because they want the land but not the people and the occupation prevents them from being a normal country.

I agree that an enduring peace would require abandoning the settlements outside of the ones on the current 67 borders. But I will also point out that what you demand was on offer in 47 and rather than accept them the surrounding Arabs went to war with Israel and lost. It's kind of rich to attempt decades of war to deny an offered border, lose repeatedly, and then demand the original offer anyways. The Palestinians themselves have made no such offer and give every indication of denying one if it was offered without an "unlimited right of return" or a "just settlement of the right of return" which has never been defined and acts as a poison pill that sounds OK to the west but could easily expand to mean enough refugees are shipped into Israel proper to effectively make Israel a Muslim majority.

But I will also point out that what you demand was on offer in 47 and rather than accept them the surrounding Arabs went to war with Israel and lost.

Setting aside the question of whether it was a smart decision to reject the partition plan, it's easy to see why they didn't view it as legitimate. Imagine if Mexican immigrants petitioned the UN to split the American Southwest into a new Hispanic state because they (illegally) immigrated there in sufficient numbers.

This is more similar to the hazy borders of Texas before it was inducted as a state in the US than Mexico trying to pull this on already established US territory. In fact the parallels are myriad and early mexico really did get screwed out of their territory after losing a war, remember the Alamo, to the American settlers. Imagine if now centuries later Mexico continued to dispute the territory and launched regular unguided rocket attacks at San Antonio. The mandate Palestine area was not a state before the fall of the Ottoman empire and had no real borders. After the fall the territory was rightfully British clay and the mandate policy gave the immigrant Jews a right to attempt to establish a state there. Was there lots of shenanigans coming from both of the budding nations? Absolutely, there were among the early Texans as well. Really the more I think of it Texas really is a pretty good analogy for Israeli history before around like 1960.

That's why the West Bank is such a millstone though. They won it in war but now they need to either integrate it or give it up. Keeping it in limbo is the source of all their problems. If Israel could actually enunciate their borders they wouldn't need to negotiate or accept anything from the Palestinians at all. The haven't needed Syria to agree to them having the Golan Heights for example. Maintaining this quasi sovereignty indefinitely is the source of essentially all their problems both internal and external.

And now yes because of Hamas handing over anything is tricky. But they had decades where they could have handed whatever rump state they wanted to the PLO. And they wouldn't have needed their agreement anymore than they need Syria's for the Golan。

I agree it's a millstone but it's far from the source of all their problems which seem more centrally to be located in the surrounding population which has a persistent belief that if they just keep fighting eventually they will drive the Jews to the sea and have the whole of the region as a Palestinian state and is thus unwilling to continence any kind of long term peace that forecloses on that possibility.

The haven't needed Syria to agree to them having the Golan Heights for example. Maintaining this quasi sovereignty indefinitely is the source of essentially all their problems both internal and external.

If they enunciated some border, say a modest expansion over the green line to encompass the majority of the settlements clustered along that line then what are their policing positions in the west bank? The fear is that pulling out without a Palestinian partner would lead to a repeat of their pull out form gaza and that the west bank would immediately become a staging ground for attacks on Israel which would eventually trigger an invasion and we'd be back to square one.

Handing over the territory without a deal might have ended up like Gaza (which is criticized even by pro-Pals as a way to freeze the peace process*). Worse maybe.

So we have to go back to why a deal didn't happen.

* Pretty damning when you think about it tbh.