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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.
After several years of being a part of this website my position is that >90% of Israel-critical takes are straightforwardly motivated by antisemitism. Those that don't make direct references to Jews being evil and conniving etc. are almost universally either bad faith ("Israel is evil because they can't guarantee zero civilian deaths among their enemies"), quite obviously false ("The Muslim world would love America if not for Israel") or complete non-sequiturs ("Jews should never have been there to begin with!")
There are a number of issues on which I have different positions from most users on this site where I still feel I could fairly reasonably steelman the alternative point of view. The general attitude towards Israel here isn't one of them. I know it's trite to equate criticism of Israel (or "Anti-Zionism", which I think is a dumb concept in this day and age but I digress) with hatred of Jews, and on the left I think it's probably more due to general Third-Worldism than anything else, but on the Motte it's really the only explanation that makes any sense to me.
You're not wrong. I just don't think there are many good reasons to truly hate Israel, as it's a democratic country that generally respects human rights, in direct contrast to all of its hostile neighbours. (Like Bill Maher says, "one side is accused of genocide but doesn't do it, the other side actually would love to do it.") You can disagree with its politics, and hold it accountable when it crosses over the line (which it certainly has done occasionally - being constantly at war sucks). But I don't think the anti-Israel posters here are capable of that level of restraint - I've just seen too many barely-filtered rants about how the US is being controlled by their evil Israeli mind-control overlords.
I think it's more a result of the gaping hole here of anything resembling a mainstream liberal. There's plenty of non-anti-semitic anti-Israel people that exist, but this place is kinda warped.
I think third-worldism is the animating factor among those people (to be clear, I'm talking about politically engaged people, not normies).
If by "third-worldism" you mean what I think you mean, I would say that this is is also a kind of anti-Semitism. In the same way some Leftist college professor hates white people, he also hates Jewish people and for pretty much the same reasons. It's more socially acceptable to openly express disdain for white people (anti-Semitism is typically disguised as anti-Zionism), but it's basically the same playbook: In any conflict between advanced people and primitive people, the Leftist sides with the primitive people, thereby (implicitly) claiming that he is morally superior to the advanced people.
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