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No specific news item for this culture war post, but perusing the comments on the various Iran war takes, I'm consistently baffled by people's attitudes towards Israel that I think are willfully uncharitable and blind to the history of the Middle East in general.
First, there's this idea that Israel is the primary/principle cause of all instability in the region, and that if we suddenly removed all the Jews and gave back the land to the Palestinians, we would have peace. This is absurd. The violence in Lebanon between shiites/sunnis/christians, the question of the Kurds, and the Sunni/Shiite Cold (I guess hot now) war are all conflicts that have their origins long before the founding of Israel. Heck if Israel wasn't there to focus hatred on, the Arabs would probably fight among themselves even more.
Secondly, it's extremely impractical, if not impossible to remove 6 million Jews from land they've now lived on for (at least) three generations. A second Nakba to correct for the first Nakba doesn't exactly seem just to me, and it's not like many of those Jews can actually go back to where they were from before emigrating to Israel. The Arab countries forcibly expelled all Sephardic Jews in 1948 after Israel won its independence (also weird how this was totally okay but Israel actions during the 1948 war are "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing". Israel also hasn't actually lost a war yet, and they won in 1948 without any outside help except for some weapons for the Czech Republic, so this would be an extremely hard sell to a population that really doesn't want to leave.
Thirdly, it's not like Israel hasn't tried to find a peaceful solution to the Palestine question or with its neighbors. Rabin actually signed the Oslo accords (before he was assassinated) and it looked like the Palestinians would be able to move towards self governance. Unfortunately, every government the Palestinians have elected have made it their central platform to destroy Israel, so it's somewhat logical that Israel decided that they couldn't self-govern (similar logic to why Israel and Iran are fighting). When I was living in Israel in the summer of 2019 (not a Jew, just doing research), it looked this might be changing, but unfortunately October 2023 changed all that. In terms of its Arab neighbors, Israel has repeatedly given up territory for peace. Of course unfortunately neither Jordan nor Egypt want the West Bank/Gaza (and also refuse to treat second, third and even fourth generation Palestinian refuges as citizens).
Fourthly, there's a (somewhat true) idea that Israel has an outsized influence in US politics. But the US also has an extremely outsized influence in Israeli politics. Up until the mid 1970s, Israel was heavily socialist country that had far more ties to the Soviet Union than the US wanted. Market liberalization similar to what happened under Reagen/Thatcher destroyed the Israeli Kibbutz system economically (among other things, I have a very long essay on my blog about this) that completely destroyed the Israeli left. Netenyahu is the logical result of this.
Fifthly, the claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza seem to be greatly exaggerated and very selective when it comes to comparisons of other actual genocides going on in the world right now (Sudan). I've been hearing claims of genocide for at least ten years now, but somehow there are more Palestinians in Gaza now than there were then? If the Israelis are trying to genocide the Palestinians they're clearly not very good at it (might be more effective to give out birth control). Claims of apartheid are more fair, but are no different from how Palestinians are treated in Arab countries. Why the special criticism of Israel?
Maybe making a Jewish state in the Middle East wasn't a great idea. So what? We live in the world where that's been the case for nearly 80 years and it's not going away without another ethnic cleansing. Israel does cause a lot of chaos and conflict in the region, but 90% is in direct response to its neighbors wanting to destroy it and kill its entire population. Why is the answer to somehow endorse that, rather than admit that maybe its time for the Palestinians to give up claims to land they haven't lived on since WW2, and the population of the Middle East to accept (as their leaders by and large have) that Israel is here to stay.
I used to think there were principled arguments against Israel and that it made sense to distinguish between anti-Zionists and anti-Semites. I found it annoying when Jews would equate opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism. It felt very manipulative, playing the "antisemitism" card when we're talking about objections to a nation's policies... And of course Israel is a country, countries are made of people and run by politicians, therefore Israel is often going to do things one can reasonably condemn.
I still believe there are a tiny number of people whose opposition to Israel is rooted in genuine principles. I think their arguments are mostly pretty unconvincing, but the New Historians, for example (a school of Israeli historians who are generally pretty critical of Israel and the Israeli narrative about its founding, but obviously don't literally want Israel to cease to exist... Benny Morris is the most notable one) are examples of "anti-Zionists but not anti-Semites."
But mostly, especially since the latest Gaza War, I no longer take criticism of Israel at face value. Sure, a lot of stuff Israel does is fucked up, a lot of stuff the US does is fucked up, and I would like all countries in the world to do fewer fucked up things. Kumbaya.
But in most places, definitely including here on the Motte, you can map with nearly 100% consistency someone who is "critical of Israel" or "anti-Zionist" to "really hates Jews." It's just become very obvious that you don't have to scratch an anti-Zionist too deeply to find someone who hates Jews. It's true out in the public amongst the "Free Palestine" demonstrators, it's true here among the posters who suddenly have deep humanitarian concern for Palestinians and Iranians. Do they have similar concerns for, say, Ukrainians and Russians? Or the participants and victims in any other conflict anywhere else in the world? Of course not.
Since October 7, demonstrators attacking anything remotely connected with Israel, whether it's an Israeli-run bakery or just a synagogue (which can always be accused of being "Zionist" because the number of synagogues that aren't full of Israel supporters is infinitesimal) have pretty much given the game away. When you claim you don't hate Jews, you just hate like 90% of all Jews, well, that kinda looks like you hate Jews to me.
So, your lengthy defense of Israel isn't wrong, but it's beside the point. Almost nobody is actually criticizing Israel because they think the Israelis should negotiate differently or if they just did this or that they could have peace. There are no circumstances in which Israel will ever be "okay" with them. They just hate Jews. Simple as.
I assume you’re a well-informed poster. You and I and everyone on this board surely knows well that ‘Free Palestine’ groups claim to be anti-colonialist, anti-racist and leftist, plus supporters of the concept of national liberation and also of BLM, for example. Their opposition to Israel’s policies rather obviously stem from this ideology and not from a general hatred of the Jewish people and not from a hard opposition towards the concept of a Jewish state in itself, as they view Israel as a white supremacist, unrepentant, aggressor settler state, and many of their members and supporters are themselves Jews. We can, of course, make all sorts of criticism of them, but this needs to be admitted. I guess we can go so far as to call them anti-white, since they see Israeli settlers and Zionists as white. At the same time, not only is their rhetoric not anti-Semitic, they do not tolerate anti-Semitism either, especially not within their own ranks.
Obviously these groups have existed before October 7th, in fact they have existed for a long time, and their ideological rhetoric against Israeli colonialism was also deployed against the US political system, which they view as structurally racist and neo-colonialist. Back when BLM was more relevant, it was the latter that was getting these activists more media attention, and I can only assume that this made many people forget that these groups are also anti-Zionist, and that accusations of anti-Semitism do not work against them at all, for the simple reason that they genuinely do not see themselves as anti-Semitic and thus do not consider themselves compelled to apologize. It’s similar to the case of the ‘Democrats are the real racists’ narrative, which does not work on Democrats one bit.
To the extent that US political opposition towards Zionism and the Zionist lobby exists outside the leftist, anti-racist, anti-colonialist milieu, I think it’s fair to say that it all stems from isolationism, to the extent that it still even exists. And the common attribute of isolationists is that they wish to isolate the US from other conflict regions in the world as well, not just Israel, so I don’t think accusations of anti-Semitism apply in their case either.
I tend to disagree with this. For example, it's no secret that Palestinian Arabs living in Lebanon (some have been their for generations) are not allowed to be Lebanese citizens; barred from various professions; etc. And yet campus Leftists don't seem to bother with "Lebanese Apartheid Week." In fact, there are many minority groups all over the world the Left doesn't seem to care about all that much. Heck, I even read that there is actual slavery of black people still going on in 2026 in some places. There is some degree of objection to what China is doing in Tibet and the western provinces, but it's nowhere near the volume of anti-Israel activities.
So it seems pretty clear that, even if one ignores the fact that Jews are actually an indigenous people of the Levant, there is a lot more going on than just generalized opposition to ethnic nationalism, colonialism, and so on.
True. At the same time, nobody is claiming that Lebanon is our greatest ally, the only democracy in the Middle East and the bastion of Judeo-Christian culture.
Before the Lebanese Civil War (1975), IIRC Lebanon had a reputation as one of the more relatable countries in the region: stable, multicultural, mostly Christian. Incidentally, that civil war was in part downstream of regional Palestinian migration and nationalism.
You're absolutely right. That was before 1975 though, as you said.
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