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I find the idea that one genocide is bigger than the other is somehow capable of disqualifying the smaller one as a genocide as pretty facially ridiculous. As is the claim that genocide requires complete elimination of the targets or that somehow high birth rates also are disqualifying. This is not a genocide thread nor do I think it should become one, but you should do yourself a favor and don't include a bullet like #5 if you aren't going to be serious about it. The question of outsize attention to Israel is pretty self-evident despite this all, I think even the most strident pro-Palestine Westerners would probably even agree if pressed that Israel gets more political attention than you'd normally expect (for different reasons of course, but the point stands).
Now obviously I agree with your central thesis; I'm the one who believes in a sort of international statute of limitations, which is about 40-50 years, after which holding grudges is stupid and mutually harmful (most of the instigators are dead by then anyways and anyone in power now very rarely would have been in power then). In that light it's obviously dumb to think that Israel should just go away. And if you look within that window, Israel's efforts at peace have been much more lackluster. Unfortunately the spate of assassinations and other developments around the turn of the century are at least partially responsible. I still personally believe that despite a lack of goodwill all around for the last 2+ decades, it's incumbent on Israel as a nominally free democracy to 'be the bigger man' and at least gesture at a solution, but it feels like there isn't even lip service paid to the idea anymore.
It's worth noting that at least many of the liberals I know usually tend to blame the post-WWI-ish semi-arbitrary drawing of boundaries as the "original sin" of Middle East instability. As the argument goes, there were large pre-existing rivalries and grudges, etc. but because ignorant Western boundary-drawing ignored them, yet at the same time enforced them and gave them weight, these conflicts were nearly inevitable. This is, to be sure, at least a little ironic given some of these same people are very pro-integration including internationally, but 'I think everyone can get along in multicultural societies' isn't actually a core liberal belief, it's mostly just useful feel-good messaging that occasionally gets press-ganged into a political point. (Even some neoconservatives adopted a variant of it for a while there)
Anyways, I probably should spend more time looking for other countries, but for example this survey in Saudi Arabia last year found: 40/33/16/9 split in very negative/somewhat negative/somewhat positive/very positive attitudes toward Hamas. 41/19/27/11 for strongly/somewhat disagree/agree that "the Palestinians will be able to defeat Israel someday". Although with that said, attitudes toward normalization and stuff like the Abraham Accords are viewed very negatively still, they equally DGAF about Iran relations improving.
My point is that even the population in the region basically know Israel is here to stay even if they remain unhappy about it. Internet comments, once again, != reality
Overall a very solid comment. There is one particular point which I think actually goes a bit deeper into how most westerners view states/governments/counties, which I think is relevant to analyzing the middle east:
I think an assumption of the liberal view, really the dominant implicit western view, is that states/countries should be commonwealths. By that, I mean states should represent both the desires of the population and act in the interests of the population. A clear implication of this view of what a country is is nationalism: if the government is supposed to represent the people, the people have to be a community/nation. This can be defined in different ways: ethnocultural nationalism in historic Germany is one way and civic nationalism in the US and France another way (simplifying things). There are other ways to define a nation as well, and most nations are a mix of definitions to a degree.
Popular sovereignty was historically not how most states worked. In general, the modern view that sovereignty came from the people started with the Atlantic Revolutions from 1775-1825. There were historic exceptions, such as many Greek city states and the Romans, but the Enlightenment is where the modern ideology proximately arrived. In both Christendom and the Islamic world, relevantly including the Ottomans, sovereignty came from god to the sovereign. The Sultan was just your boss, and unless you overthrew him that was that.
Ironically enough, this allowed a lot more cultural diversity than the commonwealth model gives. In the commonwealth model, since the nation is sovereign you have to define the nation and, to a greater or lesser extent, force everyone to identify with the nation and culturally adhere to certain national values. "We have made Italy, now we must make Italians." is a great quote about this. Same with the French eradicating their minority languages in the 1800s. If the Sultan/King is your boss, you don't need to go through those steps; just pledge loyalty to them, and you can identify/care about whomever you want. The millet system in the Ottoman empire was a great example of this; the different religions basically got to live in parallel societies, so long as they submitted to the Sultan.
This was the environment that most of the middle east came from. It went from loyalty to the sovereign, be it the Ottoman Sultan, Iranian Shah, or whomever, to trying to make commonwealths out of these states. The problem was simple: with few exceptions, the peoples of the new nations hated each other way more than they had any incentive to cooperate. While you got some 'successful' nation states, like Turkey and Iran, most states really are just some subset of the population, such as Saddam's tribesmen in Iraq or until recently Alawites in Syria, basically dominating the rest. Rhetoric aside, you have the old 'separate communities united by loyalty to the Sovereign' with the sovereign being a local potentate. I'll also note that the creates of the 'successful' nation states often involved horrific violence: Turkey being the obvious example.
Tying all of the above together, the liberals are correct that much of the middle east is an example if failed nation building. The issue with their viewpoint is that it assume the nation/commonwealth model is the best and universal model, when really that's not the case. Creating a nation is hard, involves forced conformity into the national ideal, and often involves pretty savage oppression and violence. Instead of a commonwealth government, maybe the better path would be trying to find the least offensive ersatz-king and promoting them would be the best way to promote the welfare of both middle easterners and those who deal with them. Nationalism/popular sovereignty actually demands a lot of a people, psychologically, materially, and socially, and for most of the middle east it seems the juice just ain't worth the squeeze.
This is a segue, but I think the lesson here also applies to the west to a degree. Many groups want to simultaneously tear down culturally the notion of a shared community, while still asking the inhabitants to consider each other as part of a shared community and act accordingly. I think this contradiction causes a lot of the political and social conflicts we see in the west today, although tbh wealth anesthetizes things over so it may remain a relatively minor deal.
Well, some wish to build a sentiment of worldwide community for the Human Race - the planet Earth as one big commonwealth, with countries and borders as an administrative tool not different from a country itself dividing itself up into Länder or counties or regions with varying degrees of local government.
You might think this is utopian, but it's not a contradiction - and I think this was genuinely the dream of many in the late 20th century, explicitly or implicitly, with the infrastructure of the EU and UN as steps towards implementing such a thing. The hope was that national identity would simply become irrelevant to fostering civic spirit as progress and globalization and the Internet built up a sentiment that we're all in this together. People would genuinely become citizens of the world in their hearts, and vote for the good of their countrymen as a special case of voting for the good of Homo sapiens in the same way that you vote for the good of your town as a special case of voting for the good of your country.
I think, then, that the current malaise results from resurgent (or simply stubbornly-not-fading-away-on-schedule) nationalist sentiment making itself known loudly enough in various parts of the world that what was once merely optimistic now looks genuinely unreachable in the short term.
I agree with the notion that all humans do owe each other some things. Off the top of my head, non-aggression and a degree of respect for one example. I this all national identities, both ethnic and civic, are contingent on history and convenience. I don't think a global identity is any more or any less invalid philosophically than a national identity from first principles. I think that internationalism has actually had a decent amount of success both materially, pax-Americana has been the best time to be alive in human history, and ethically, most people agree in the value of the international community to a greater or lesser extent. At the same time, I think nations are a Chesterton's fence that we should be careful about rapidly changing, now that they exist.
I think the problem comes as follows: what happens when the interests of yourself/your family/whatever relevant community you are a part of conflict with those of the nation or, in this case, the human race?
Ever single nation has had to deal with that question: there are always parts of the nation that get elevated and other parts that get shafted. It can be as personal as sacrificing your wellbeing in a war for that of a nation, or as abstract/community based as your language being suppressed like in the case of Occitan vs French or your religion being seen as seditious or semi-seditious such as in the Kulturkampf in Germany or Catholicism to many regimes in France. I think the recent surge of the populist right is less about a pro-active increase in national sentiment and more about subsets of different nations feeling culturally and/or economically shafted by the recent economic and social changes in their countries.
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The reason I feel it's doomed is because a shared group identity, a "us", can only exist in a contrast against a "them", otherwise it's amorphous and fails to inspire. Which is why I believe a united earth will only realistically happen when there will be something else for it to be contrasted against, be it other human colonies or aliens.
Could the 'them' be Nature, which has beset us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys, struck down half of our children from the dawn of time until two centuries ago, and, if Charles Murray's observations are accurate, is an unrepentant racist to boot?
Human efforts to bring Nature to heel: arrogant hubris, or the Moral Equivalent of War?
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I don’t understand your definition of a genocide. Genocide means an elimination of an entire race. If the population of a race is increasing in an area it’s not a genocide, or at least it’s a very bad one. What’s happening in Gaza looks very different from actual intentional genocides in the past, which involved deliberate mass murder of civilians. What the Israelis are doing looks much more like war, with a lowered tolerance for civilians casualties.
From what I've seen, IDF tactics have not been any more offensive than US WW2 tactics. One could make the argument that this war overall is immoral, or the overall strategy is needlessly extending it, and thus the civilians casualties are immoral since the war is unjust either wholly or partly. I think that's a serious argument which I'm not fully rejecting or accepting due to uncertainty.
While some Israeli leaders are talking pretty harshly, the actual conduct of the IDF is not that of a genocidal army. I'm not a fan of what I see as pro-Israeli interests distorting US policy, but I do sympathize with the Israelis since they are outnumbered in a very bad neighborhood and are dealing with a population, Palestinians, that due to both popular sympathies and the spoiler effect seem unwilling and incapable to actually stick to any halfway reasonable bargain.
I feel like I'm living in some parallel universe to posters here, but things coming out of the IDF recently look worse than Azeri conduct in Armenia a few years ago. I had to actively block all war accounts on Twitter after the recent "8 month baby torture video" which I don't think I've ever seen any military do, ever. Don't get me started on videos of beating up old people in literal, currently ongoing pogroms in the West Bank. Machine gunning down hundreds of civilians intentionally in Gaza etc. This happened along a steady stream of Israeli officials literally calling for the murder of their enemies children, btw. Calling this "talking pretty harshly" seems genuinely bewildering to me.
I'm extremely skeptical of your claim. For starters, can you (1) post the videos of the IDF "machine gunning down hundreds of civillians intentionally in Gaza; and (2) specify exactly what you mean by "ongoing pogroms in the West Bank"
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Ignorant? They knew exactly what they were doing. You know what's nice? When you have to pull out of somewhere, but you don't want it getting all strong and independent because you'd still like to exert influence over the area.
So, you set up lovely borders that incite ethnic/religious conflict and let it rip!
The USSR/Russians did the same with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
The West also drew some odd boundaries in the West, post WWI, but the Treaty of Versailles was more a mess of conflicting priorities and petitions than it was "let's set up European ethnic/religious conflict!"
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The Brits leaving Palestine was like the Americans leaving Afghanistan. We’d been through two gruelling wars, we under constant lethal attack from both Jewish (the Stern Gang) and (I think) Arabic terrorists who made it extremely clear they wanted us to get the hell out of there, and we did. The fact that the area is full of bloodthirsty maniacs isn’t our fault - it’s been like that since the Old Testament days and all we’d ever been able to do was keep a lid on it.
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The USSR actually tried incredibly hard to create logical boundaries in Central Asia. They did not deliberately leave minorities places. But Soviet ethnographers did not always access groups accurately because of ignorance on their part and lack of national consciousness on the populations part. Or more commonly because these groups were all mixed together and it was impossible to draw clear lines. Regardless if you read the commission on nationalities (headed by one Joseph Stalin) they were not intentionally leaving minorities anywhere but rather a clean national delineation was just impossible. The jigsaw boundaries and enclaves and exclaves were an attempt to gerrymander clear nations where there were none.
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