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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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Why do you exclude South Africa-style reintegration? Eventually someone is going to realize that grotesque jihadi violence is counterproductive and that they would get way more stuff if they kept the Jews around to milk welfare out of.

Scott once noticed that the best place in the middle east to be an Arab outside the oil rich states is Israel. Smart Palestinians should be arguing to the world that the just punishment for Israel's actions is that they must annex all of Gaza and the West Bank, make everyone living there full citizens of Israel and provide them with the same access to resources as they do to any other Israeli citizen right now.

the just punishment for Israel's actions is that they must annex all of Gaza and the West Bank, make everyone living there full citizens of Israel and provide them with the same access to resources as they do to any other Israeli citizen right now.

Are you not aware that this has been the leftist demand the whole time? The problem is obvious. If Israel annexes the whole of mandate Palestine then the Jews will be a minority and swiftly have the mechanism of state turned on them. At best they would be Dhimmi in a shariah state subject to the abuses that have led to there being basically no jews anywhere else in the islamic world and with a reasonably high chance of being subject to massive pogroms that would make the holocaust seem loving by comparison.

Right. So, rather the Americans should be telling Israelis to move to some corner of Montana and have at it. Because what's happening is not tenable by modern ethical standards, either lording it over a population in that way or having a state charter built on the lord.

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.

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.

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.