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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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An existing nation changing their head of state doesn't seem to me like it would set a precedent applicable here.

"An existing nation changing their head of state" leaves the territory of that nation unchanged. The events to which I am referring involve land which was the territory of the United Kingdom/France/Portugal/&c. becoming not the territory of those nations.

The land between the Jordan and Mediterranean was, in 1945, British territory under a League of Nations mandate. The United Kingdom and the United Nations, along with the Jewish organisations, agreed to a plan for the disposition of that territory. At that point, the Palestinian Arabs had a legal claim to Ramallah, Nablus, and Hebron. They did not have a legitimate claim to Tel Aviv or Haifa; those were British territory in the process of being transferred to Israel.

I am explicitly against wokeness and social justice politics

And I appreciate that you are more reasonable than them. That is what I was trying to convey; I apologise if I was unclear.

Not in my experience. A lot of people realise that there is a portion of the Israeli population who genuinely have nowhere else to go, despite the vast portions of the Israeli population that can just go back to Poland or France or whatever. Once you throw in real, muscular denazification efforts (i.e. prosecutions for anyone connected to war crimes, like whoever gave the order to bulldoze piles of civilian bodies to that soldier who killed himself) and efforts to achieve justice, I'm sure the Palestinians would welcome the remainder.

I doubt they would; there are many Palestinians who want the Jews either dead or living as second-class citizens, and are willing to pursue that by violence, and few who are willing to stop them. Furthermore, even assuming for the sake of argument that the Palestinian population were willing to extend Palestinian citizenship to some, or even most, formerly Israeli Jews, said population, as well as those living in HaGaluth, would be perpetually living with the implication that, if their gentile neighbours were to acquire a specimen of Apis mellifera in their haberdashery, their survival would be dependent on convincing the gentile majority in some other country that they 'deserve' to live more than said majority deserves not to be inconvenienced.

By supporting the claiming of territory via acts like that massacre, you are actually condoning the killing of non-combatants.

That argument could also support the claim that, by supporting the (Arabs') claiming of territory (the blue areas on this map) via acts like the Kfar Etzion massacre, one is also condoning the killing of non-combatants.

By supporting Israel's current genocidal efforts, you are supporting and condoning the killing of non-combatants like Hind Rajab or Mohammed Bhar.

I do not condone every action of the State of Israel, merely its continued existence; nor do I oppose accountability for the individuals responsible for wrongdoing, merely the collective punishment of Israelis who did not participate. (Yes, I am aware that some Israeli actions could be classified under that heading; that does not mean that all Israelis are responsible. If a teacher holds an entire class back from recess because one student misbehaved, that does not justify suspending every teacher in the school.)

I disagree - if you ignore the role that NATO expansion and the treatment of Russian-speakers after the Maidan you're not really painting an accurate picture of what happened. But that argument has been litigated elsewhere if you really want to get into it.

The NATO expansion doesn't signify; the decision of the Czech Republic/Poland/the Baltic states/&c. to pursue NATO membership was

  1. none of Russia's business, and

  2. being motivated by concern that Russia would be unwilling to accept its neighbours' unwillingness to jump when Russia said 'frog', turned out to be quite prescient.

Incorrect - Israel had been bombing, blowing up and illegally settling Palestinian territory for quite some time beforehand.

I interpreted 'the current conflict in Gaza' in the narrower sense of the most recent campaign; the broader conflict was started by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in 1967.

"Less than immaculate pasts" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I honestly don't care that Ghislaine Maxwell or her compatriots aren't going to have a homeland of their own - prison or the bottom of the sea seems like a perfectly fine place for those like her with "non-immaculate pasts".

I'm not referring to Ghislaine Maxwell, I'm referring to someone with a thirty-year-old conviction for DUI, or a fist-fight, or shoplifting, or something of similar magnitude, often cited as a reason to refuse even very temporary entry by governments. I do not condone these things, but does a person who drinks and drives, or pilfers from a store, or punches someone he doesn't like, thus deserve to spend the rest of his life under the Sword of Damocles?

Also, what about the other category in that question?

Then what a shame that this is what they have decided to do with their state

And it is reasonable to want the people responsible held accountable. It is not reasonable to want a future Anne Frank held responsible, multiplied by six million.

the existence of a German-majority state is seen as non-negotiable by a lot of Germans

And if Germans had been subjected to what Jews have been subjected to over the past two millennia, that might be, if not on the same plane, at least in the same airport.

but that doesn't mean Nazi Germany should have been allowed to mass-murder Jewish civilians.

In 1925, Jews were less than one percent of the population of Germany. Israel has more than twenty percent Arab citizens.

Maybe after Israel is wiped from the map

Germany wasn't 'wiped from the map' even after doing far worse than even the most extreme accusations of Israeli conduct.

they can try again somewhere else, and avoid practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

Where? Where else should a Jewish-majority state be established, and what will become of the people currently living there? (If you can solve this, and establish such a state beforehand, I suspect you would get far more support for a single bi-national state in the former cis-Jordanian Mandate.)