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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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To call Israel an apartheid state requires pretending Gaza is part of Israel, which it isn't.

You can argue it *should" be, but there's the tiny problem that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians want that. What the Israelis would like is for the Palestinians to flourish in their own state that won't dedicate itself to destroying Israel. That's not on the table. What the Palestinians want is largely why we are where we are.

At this point, "Israel is an apartheid state" is exactly the tell I was talking about because it requires imposing criteria that aren't used anywhere else in the world. You can look at Arabs who actually are living in Israel and see that they are not apartheided.

The Bantustans weren't part of South Africa either. Though I think the West Bank is the better example. Israeli Arabs aren't apartheided you are right. But Jewish and Arab settlements are treated very differently in the West Bank. As well that the expansion of settlements has created an intertwined society with very different rights depending on race and religion. The actions of settling the West Bank are making a Palestinian state impossible.

I have said before I think Israel should be pressured to rein in the West Bank settlers and stop victimizing Palestinians there. However, even if Israel pulled out of the West Bank right now and ceded all of it to the Palestinians, I do not think this would lead to a viable Palestinian state. A viable Palestinian state requires a Palestinian population that wants a viable state more than they want to destroy Israel.

At this point, "Israel is an apartheid state" is exactly the tell I was talking about because it requires imposing criteria that aren't used anywhere else in the world. You can look at Arabs who actually are living in Israel and see that they are not apartheided.

Actually, the South Africans, literally the prototypical example of "apartheid", had a plan pretty similar to that of Israel where they would cram all of the inconvenient blacks into tiny plots of land called "Bantustans" that gave South Africa all of the cool benefits of sovereignty without all the lame obligations that come along with it like "citizenship" or "human rights".

For some reason, though, nobody fell for this trick when the South Africans tried it. I wonder why that is?

You can argue it *should" be, but there's the tiny problem that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians want that. What the Israelis would like is for the Palestinians to flourish in their own state that won't dedicate itself to destroying Israel. That's not on the table. What the Palestinians want is largely why we are where we are.

On the contrary, this is what the former head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group notable for being even more hardline than Hamas, had to say:

We have lived together in peace for centuries. And if Netanyahu were to ask if we can live together in one state, I would say to him: "If we have exactly the same rights as Jews to come to all of Palestine. If Khaled Meshaal and Ramadan Shalah can come whenever they want, and visit Haifa, and buy a home in Herzliyah if they want, then we can have a new language, and dialogue is possible.

So even the most hardcore terrorists have said that they'd be perfectly willing to accept a "South Africa" solution and that they actually wouldn't mind officially considering Gaza to be a part of a unified Israel-Palestine. The Israelis are the reason such a solution isn't on the table, not the Palestinians.

I think a one-state solution would in theory be ideal, but I also think it's delusional to think it would work, and I think the Israelis are not wrong to doubt the ingenuousness of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hamas or the Ayatollah's words for public consumption insisting all they want is peaceful coexistence, just dissolve the borders and dismantle your security, everything will be cool bro, honest.

The thing is, the Israelis have a lot of people who speak Arabic, so they can hear and read what Palestinians say in Arabic to each other, not just what they say in English to a Western audience.

Unlike Israël, apartheid SA’s citizen body wasn’t 20% black.

So even the most hardcore terrorists have said that they'd be perfectly willing to accept a "South Africa" solution and that they actually wouldn't mind officially considering Gaza to be a part of a unified Israel-Palestine. The Israelis are the reason such a solution isn't on the table, not the Palestinians.

Their actual actions suggest they'd immediately set about random suicide bombings and whatnot

South African example is also absurd when the African population wasn't even that particularly native to the area and largely descended from the North chasing the economic affluence created by white settlement. Of course, many such cases, but doing anything at all to trace the movements of local peoples beyond 'they're not white and they happen to be there, clearly true custodians from time immemorial' would require actually thinking somewhat about one's positions.

I think they could make a one-state solution work. The suicide bombings would dissipate when the Arab children found themselves 20x more wealthy than their recent ancestors. Israel would need the stomach to take some shots without over-retaliating.

Israel was trying economic diplomacy via work permits prior to October 7. I don’t think the solution to preventing October 7 was just "well, should have paid more!"

Economic integration is positive sum

it requires imposing criteria that aren't used anywhere else in the world.

In fairness, Gaza's situation is in itself pretty unique. I don't think classifying it as an apartheid state is especially helpful, but there isn't really any truly analogous situation elsewhere in the world that you can point to and say "aha, but by this definition, wouldn't [X] be an apartheid state too?". It's just a one-of-a-kind clusterfuck that people struggle to squeeze into a round hole.

Taiwan and mainland China are the closest comparison I can think of, and they aren't a close comparison at all.

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