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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27257 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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What is the Zionist model of antisemitism*?

Matt Yglesias posted what turned out to be a surprisingly hot take that the downturn in public opinion of Israel is a result of Israeli actions, and that the best way for Israel to fix its public relations problem is to change its actions vis-a-vis the Palestinian issue and foreign policy.

I was surprised at the pushback. This seems straightforwardly true. There was a great chart I saw a few days ago, which I am unfortunately unable to find, which showed that public opinion of Israel has been approximately this low before. It was in 1982 with the invasion of Lebanon and the notoriously brutal siege of Beirut.

Most of the alternative theories fell into two camps.

  1. Antisemitism is a result of massive, society-wide misinformation perpetuated by the press, universities, and social media. This is the “wall of dead children” model. Israel’s actions don’t really matter because they will be twisted and misrepresented anyways. The solution is to exert more control over the information environment.
  2. Antisemitism is an intrinsic force of nature. It doesn’t have a cause, or if it does, it has a cause which cannot be effectively operated upon. Asking what causes antisemitism is like asking what causes DeCarlos Brown to stab people on the subway. The way to deal with antisemitism is to kill, deport, or disenfranchise antisemites.

It’s hard to tell how religious the people in 2. are, but my general impression is, “quite a bit”. Many of them seem to speak of antisemitism as if it were a spiritual fault, another manifestation of the platonic ideal of pure evil. Seen as a spiritual problem, the correct response is to become even more aggressively Jewish. This has the rather large problem of being counterproductive when, e.g. smashing idols goes wrong.

*By “antisemitism” in this post I almost exclusively mean “antizionism”. I use the term to maintain consistency with the pro-Israel literature I am engaging with, not as an endorsement that antizionism = antisemitism.

Sort of related: I recently read an article called "On Collective Jewish Guilt".

I understand that anti-Zionism is not intrinsically reducible to antisemitism, and that, in theory, one could oppose the existence of Israel while harbouring no ill will towards Jews and wanting them to be safe. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that, in many cases, anti-Zionism is the motte and antisemitism is the bailey. This article argues that you can tell a lot of anti-Zionists don't really mean what they say based on how they react to antisemitic terror attacks and hate crimes that take place outside of Israel (e.g. the recent Hanukkah mass shooting on Bondi Beach). After all, if anti-Zionists were really only opposed to the state of Israel, you would logically expect them to be the first to condemn attacks on the Jewish diaspora, and in the loudest possible terms: after all, if they believe that a dedicated Jewish state is not necessary to ensure the safety of Jews, they should be the ones most opposed to attacks on Jews outside of Israel. That is, to put it charitably, not what we see. Every time there has been an antisemitic terror attack or hate crime in the last two and a half years, I have seen one or more of the following:

  • sympathetic framing of the perpetrator ("his family were killed in an airstrike in Lebanon")
  • claims that such attacks are bound to be expected as a consequence of the war in Gaza i.e. victim-blaming (as if a handful of Australian Jews, many of whom had presumably never set foot in Israel, have the slightest say in Israeli politics or IDF tactics)
  • outright suggestions that the attack was staged by Mossad as a false flag attack

I am sure there is someone out there who is opposed to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds but legitimately harbours no animosity towards Jews on an interpersonal level and sincerely wishes them no harm. (This is the person Freddie deBoer claims to be; I don't believe him.) But in my experience, nine times out of ten a Gentile who calls himself anti-Zionist will eventually be revealed to be antisemitic, and I'm sick of trying to pretend otherwise.

"So I know the group our people are targeting for harassment and abuse now is the same group our people have been targeting for harassment and abuse for centuries. And I know that our justifications for harassing and abusing them (they murder children, they control the banks, they control the media, they're sexual degenerates) are literally word-for-word the same as the justifications we used for centuries before now. But our harassment and abuse is totally justified now because of anti-colonialism, guys."

I understand that anti-Zionism is not intrinsically reducible to antisemitism, and that, in theory, one could oppose the existence of Israel while harbouring no ill will towards Jews and wanting them to be safe.

It is interesting that a Palestinian whose family was ethnically cleansed by Israel in order for them to have a jewish majority, is not allowed to just be against that, but have to also assure zionists that they: "harbour no ill will against jews"

It is interesting that a Palestinian whose family was ethnically cleansed by Israel in order for them to have a jewish majority, is not allowed to just be against that, but have to also assure zionists that they: "harbour no ill will against jews"

Are you able to provide a specific example of this having happened? Because I'm rather skeptical.

Current pravda is that the Jews ethnically cleansed the area of the modern Israeli state in 1948.

Current pravda is that the Jews ethnically cleansed the area of the modern Israeli state in 1948.

I'm very pro-Israel, and I concede that there was limited ethnic cleansing which went on.

The question is this: If a descendant of an Arab who was ethnically cleansed in this way were to criticize Israel, would any prominent Zionists insist that the person provide assurances that they weren't an anti-Semite?

I tend to doubt it. Of course part of the problem is that the vast vast majority of anti-Israel criticism comes from people who have no personal stake in the conflict. For those people, if they hold Israel to double-standards (and most do), it's reasonable -- at a minimum -- to strongly suspect them of anti-Semitism.

Among Palestinian Arabs, of course, they are often pretty open about the fact that they hate Jews. In this day and age, if someone is openly a fan of Hitler; or votes for a political party whose political platform promises to kill all Jews everywhere, well, at that point the burden is more or less on them.

It's even more interesting that you seem to be essentially arguing that antisemitism is defensible or even justifiable.

Antisemitic thoughts and speech among Palestinians whose family members have been mistreated by Jews in living memory is just as defensible as any other justified ethnic hatred. Were one being eristic, one might compare it to the routine anti-German sentiment that kept popping up in the cultural output of Jewish and philosemitic Americans well into the 1980s.

Antisemitic thoughts and speech among Palestinians whose family members have been mistreated by Jews in living memory is just as defensible as any other justified ethnic hatred.

Sure. And what about antisemitic violence? And specifically antisemitic violence targeting Jews who've never set foot in Israel and who have no say in Israeli policy or IDF military tactics?

Another example of how the word antisemitism has lost all meaning.

Palestinians have every right to not give a shit about the feelings of jews when they critisize the founding of Israel.

It's one thing to be indifferent towards the feelings of Jews. When Israelis criticise Palestinian militants, they are not complaining that Palestinians don't care about their feelings. They are complaining that Palestinian militants are trying to kill them, because they are Jews.

This is an entirely bad faith reply. We have been discussing ideology, not militancy.

Okay, well one example of the kind of "ideology" to which I refer is Hamas apologism, which I believe is not reducible to simple anti-Zionism. Supposing a non-Palestinian person who has never been personally victimised by Jews expresses support for Hamas and thinks that their actions on October 7th were justified. Is it reasonable for me to conclude that such a person simply hates Jews as a group, or could such a stance be compatible with anti-Zionism i.e. opposition to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds, without any concomitant antipathy towards Jews as a group?

This feels like we are just erecting an impossible standard for being described as a neurotypical person that also dislikes Israel. I.e, we want to label everyone who does not like Israel with a verbal guillotine called 'antisemitism'. Which is conveniently defined by us as an ever evolving collection of psychosocial irrational delusions. Sucks to be one of those, I guess.

The article’s most grating implicit premise is that dissent is only permitted if one first secures a survival plan for Israeli ethnocentrism. This is irksome not just because Israel is not holding itself to such a standard with its own actions against the Palestinians, but also because it relies on the lack of such a standard existing in the western world. Where Israel holds seemingly no reservations about sending any and all refugees their continued ethnocentric existence might cause. It's a catch 22 for the argument.

If the author thinks they are hoisting leftists by their own petard by employing this rhetoric, let me introduce you to the rich history of jewish intellectuals that spent their lives dismantling even the notion that ingroup bias, nations, or biology itself should exist in any relevant way in the western mind when we think of ourselves or our identities!

To the articles assertions more directly: Diaspora jews are probably the most self aware and protected group in the world. They are funded by tax payers like no other. Their representation in media is rivaled by none and the attention they receive from world leaders borders on absurdity. The notion that the multiculti death worlds that diaspora intellectual jews have helped create in the west are not safe for jews because of the imported muslims that Zionist policies necessitated and many diaspora jews aided in the import of is, on top of the audacious hypocrisy, not rational.

Jews are not going more extinct in the west than any other western group. On that simple fact the debate is over. Jews are not put upon, jews are not oppressed. They are just... suffering from a collection of irrational psychosocial delusions. Call it 'authoritarian-ingroup-hysteria'. They are afflicted with the odd and outdated notion of ingroup bias towards their own kind. That ones ingroups continued existence as a coherent sovereign entity is somehow valuable or relevant. Or that attacks against the ingroup are personally relevant. The western world has long dissolved any notion pertaining to such ideation. Nowhere is the continued existence of Europeans demanded. Least of all by leftists or jews! We deserved 9/11! Diversity is our strength! Our genes will survive no matter our phenotypic expression! Beige Power!

...I could go on and on. Thank you for linking the article, it was traumatizing.

Nowhere is the continued existence of Europeans demanded

It's close, but the continued existence of French Canadians is certainly demanded.

Nowhere is the continued existence of Europeans demanded.

To push back on this point: depending on how you define it, there are two orders of magnitude more white Europeans in the world then there are Jews, and the global population of white Europeans has not declined at any point in the last century. Jews are not mistaken to perceive themselves as a vulnerable population in a way that white Europeans are not.

It doesn't matter how much more there is of one group than the other, when their core mechanism of cohesion has been, and is still being eroded.

In practical terms it kind of does matter.

I think you'll need to elaborate on that.

Just within the last generation you could see a massive cultural and demographic shift in Europe, even in it's most populated countries, and any pushback against the trend will only get harder with each passing day. Is the fact that technically it will take more for us to die off, than it would for a smaller population, supposed to console me somehow?

It's not meant to console you in particular. I'm just trying to illustrate that, for reasons of demography, the outright extermination of Jews in a couple of generations is a live possibility in a way it simply isn't for white Europeans.

Not really. We should still care about Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Swedes, Finns, Norwegians, Danes, the Irish, Icelanders... etc., etc., etc., far before we care about the Jews. If we shouldn't care about these nations because they are all "white" and "whiteness" will live on without them, we also shouldn't care about the Jews. Unless you want to tell me that Jews aren't white.

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I think the perpetrator in that case….just read the article….did in fact have proper cause to shoot up a synagogue. He’s still my enemy. Most Jews do support Israel, many go on their free trip to Israel, vote for US guns to go to Israel, and the key point ISRAEL did kill a bunch of his family in Lebanon. Human groups do have conflict. He doesn’t have the state capacity to go win a war and remove Israel. This isn’t mistake theory….he is/was properly at war with Israel. Same thing Bin Laden the US did arm a regime that was against his interests. He had a proper cause to hit the US and the US being mightier after being hit had cause to torture and kill his supporters. It’s war. Civilizations are clashing and they kill each other.

My personal vote is we should have never let a Lebanese Muslim into the country. There’s no crying in war. If your tribe kills a guys family then yes he’s allowed to try and kill your tribe.

That’s not a defense he has to get off for murder but it is a moral justification for revenge. And I support the US cops killing him.

and the key point ISRAEL did kill a bunch of his family in Lebanon

But this is that exact absurd collective guilt framing the article was decrying!

A few years ago, Liam Neeson told an anecdote about how, when he was younger, a close friend of his was raped by a black man, which drove him into such a rage that he stalked the streets of London carrying a cosh, looking for a black man to beat up in retribution (thankfully he didn't go through with it in the end). He told this anecdote essentially as a cautionary tale about how ugly, prejudiced attitudes can sneak up even on well-meaning people, and how one must actively resist the urge to submit to one's darkest base impulses – and even with this context he was still excoriated as a racist.

Meanwhile, a Lebanese man shoots up a synagogue in Canada, and people say "well, several of his family members were killed by people who share ethnic heritage with the people in that synagogue, so he was justified in trying to kill them".

Would an American who lost family on 9/11 be justified in shooting up a mosque? Would an Englishman who lost family in an IRA bombing be justified in shooting up a Catholic church in Clapham?

Being Jewish and at a Synagogue isn’t quite the same thing as being black. I understand people’s desire to keep the culture of their parents buts it’s still a CHOICE to be Jewish and at a Synagogue. American Jewish money and votes are a big reason why Israel wins wars. Maybe just being at a Synagogue doesn’t make you complicit with Israel but at what point would you be part of their war effort? A person donating to AIPAC or more?

Now I am not saying any random person gets to take action here. But at some point you end up being a Nazi and a Frenchmen living in NYC in 1942 and you become 2 people who are actually in war living in a third country.

So I will asks you a question what actions by the Jewish Synagogue would make it not “Collective Guilt” for a man with family killed by Israel to shoot them?

To answer your final question would an American be justified shooting up a mosque who had losts a family member in 9/11? Potentially yes.

"You can be as Jewish as you like, just as long as you don't engage in any of the cultural practices associated with Judaism, not even in private."

To answer your final question would an American be justified shooting up a mosque who had losts a family member in 9/11? Potentially yes.

What is the word "potentially" doing there? Would an American who lost a family member in 9/11 be morally justified in shooting up a mosque, yes or no?

Potentially I believe I was referring to is it a Mosque that passes around a hat funding X,Y,Z I’m a terrorist cell. So then yes. Same as if someone who lost a person to an IRA bomb shooting up an Irish pub in Boston that took donations. So yes there would need to be an added connection in these cases.

So what you're really saying is "Alice is entitled to seek revenge on people who actively conspired to murder Alice's family members". That's really not what I'm asking. I'm asking, is an American who lost a family member on 9/11 entitled to shoot up a mosque even if he has no reason to suspect that any of the worshippers in said mosque had even the most tangential role to play in 9/11? Is he entitled to shoot up a mosque purely on the basis that the worshippers in that mosque are part of the same "tribe" (broadly defined) as the people who killed his family?

Just shooting for tribe affiliation would be wrong. This was with regards to Israel. So what I was proposing at what point does a Synagogue have actual ties to Israel and it’s not just affiliation?

It’s a good bet that a lot of the young adults visit Israel and probably did birth right tours. Highly likely many have dual citizenship. A reasonable bet their is backing of AIPAC which has been Israel’s hammer to keep significant military aid flowing to Israel.

I think we could agree for a Muslim who had relatives killed by IDF that Sheldon Adelson would be an appropriate revenge target. The US obvious does drone strikes on people who raised funding and organization capital for terrorists.

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I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack. I do remember, however, the posts about how the Rabbi who died had a habit of spamming X with calls of “Amalek”. (Amalek being the enemy of the Jewish people whom the Jews are mandated to blot out from existence, including the women and children). So, for instance, he often called the Hague Amalek, because the Hague was shown videos of IDF soldiers cheering the slogan “there are no uninvolved civilians [in Gaza]”, and I suppose he didn’t want the goyim to know that, so that made the Hague Amalek. Then he called them Amalek a couple other times, and in response to a video of a starving Palestinian woman who hadn’t eaten for five days, he simply called that AI. I think this sort of merciless disregard for the good of others does not engender the sort of sympathy normally allocated to victims of horrible tragedies, even though it was a tragedy all the same.

I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack.

Funny you bring that up, given I never claimed they did.

I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack.

Such a sly rephrasing.

What @FtttG said was:

  • sympathetic framing of the perpetrator ("his family were killed in an airstrike in Lebanon")
  • claims that such attacks are bound to be expected as a consequence of the war in Gaza i.e. victim-blaming (as if a handful of Australian Jews, many of whom had presumably never set foot in Israel, have the slightest say in Israeli politics or IDF tactics)
  • outright suggestions that the attack was staged by Mossad as a false flag attack

This is accurate.

We could perhaps add:

  • Pointing out the problematic social media posts of one of the victims.

You're right, almost no one is going to go mask-off and say "I support shooting Jews because I just really fucking hate Jews."

Even the most vehement Jew-haters are more sly than that.

I am sure there is someone out there who is opposed to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds but legitimately harbours no animosity towards Jews on an interpersonal level and sincerely wishes them no harm.

I feel this describes most of the Jewish Americans that I knew in college and highschool. Especially the ethnically and culturally Jewish that did little of the actual religion part. I didn't get to poll many of them after the October 7th attack, but the few I did poll seemed to have shifted a bit after that. More pro Zionist obviously.

There is something to be said about the people harping on the Jewish state online the loudest are just generally not happy with Jewish people.

I sort of feel that the best solution would be for Jews to just all live in America. The middle east seems like a shit hole. The fact that they really want to stay there and make it work seems strange to me. I feel no animosity towards Jewish people, and I certainly tend to enjoy their comedy (ari schafir) and writing (scott Alexander). I'd be happy to have more of them as neighbors.

It just seems like a doomed project to have an ethnostate and religious minority in a third world area, and neighbors with one of the most war happy religions out there. I am confused how the Israel project seemed like a good idea ever. Unless it was a naked attempt to just kick the remaining Jews out of Europe and let the Muslims finish the ethnic cleansing that Hitler started.

Hmm. While very far from feasible, it looks to me like the best course of action would be to move all the Israelis to Japan.

There's actual historical precedent here, one that's charming/alarming depending on how you feel about inheriting a plan whose original architects cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a strategy primer.

In the 1930s, Imperial Japan seriously proposed resettling up to a million European Jewish refugees in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Officials in the Japanese military and foreign ministry had read the Protocols, naively took it as genuine, and concluded that people with such allegedly vast economic power would be excellent to have on the team.

They called it the Fugu Plan, after the pufferfish: dangerous if mishandled, a delicacy if prepared right. The plan kinda sputtered out when Japan allied with Nazi Germany, but Chiune Sugihara's visas and the Shanghai ghetto made their mark on history, and they saved thousands of lives.

There's a real philosemitic strand: Den Fujita, the Japanese founder of McDonald's Japan, wrote The Jewish Way of Doing Business and exhorted readers to imitate Jewish commercial methods. Shichihei Yamamoto's The Japanese and the Jews sold over a million copies as the bestseller of 1970.* But the "Jewish corners" of Japanese bookstores also stock overtly antisemitic works, including The Secret of Jewish Power to Control the World, authored by a sitting member of the Japanese Diet. Then again, there are scholarly claims that Japanese philosemitism and antisemitism sit on the same underlying belief structure: that Jews are a uniquely powerful, unified, globally influential people. Which is... true? How you feel about it is your problem.

And Japan has its own demographic crisis, so it's not like the influx of people would be bad for them. Scraping off a few feet of top-soil from the Holy Land shouldn't be beyond the ability of modern Israel, and that's what they care about, right? Move the magic dirt and we're good. Plus given the popularity of anime and Japanese culture, it's not like there aren't going to be hundreds of thousands of weebs in Israel who'd consider Japan to be their new holy land anyway.

(The AMAI run Animatsuri at the Jerusalem Convention Center, the Israeli embassy making anime shorts(!), manga tributes to the IDF)

I wouldn't go so far as to say this is a good idea, but it's also far from the worst idea, and it's also very, very funny. If I was the ruler of the world, you bet we'd put a premium on funny. And this would put me in the good graces of the future Judeo-Hapa master race, so I'm covering all my bases.

*published under the pseudonym "Isaiah Ben-Dasan," a fictional Jewish observer who supposedly explained Japan to itself. A Japanese man writing as an imaginary Jew to tell Japanese people what they're like is almost too on-the-nose for the thesis.

Oh dear, am I allowed to say "on the nose" without accusations of either/both antisemitism or anti-Asian discrimination? I don't know.

Definitely a funny option. Though if they had somehow ended up in Taiwan as a result of this, and been right on top of computer chip production. Oy vey, imagine those rumors of Jewish control.

Clearly the only logical solution is to just swap the populations of Taiwan and Israel.

I sort of feel that the best solution would be for Jews to just all live in America.

Freddie deBoer argued that, if the purpose of Israel is to be a country where Jews will be safe forever, the US already fits the bill. If I recall correctly, he posted this article before that couple were shot dead in DC and that Egyptian guy threw Molotovs at a group of Jews, one of whom died from her injuries. I'm curious if he's revised his position any.

I think DC would need a few hundred more incidents like that in a year to rival an israeli citizen's terrorism danger. I think I'd revise my position if these sorts of incidents became neighborhood awareness of threats rather than national news. Which would maybe be around a few dozen happening each year in most or all cities, and many more happening in Jewish centers like New York.

The perpetrators are also as far as I'm aware still treated like full criminals, with no chance of them being handed off to a neighboring nation in a hostage exchange.

I think there's plenty of places that they could have stuck the Israel project and it'd be a pure unalloyed good. Northern Australia, for instance, where there's fuck all people right now and I'd expect the Jewish diaspora to be far more productive than what's currently there. I do also feel that a lot of the Israel in the Middle East situation was impacted by the sheer amount of Oil reserves in the region, as otherwise the neighboring states would have very little scope to productively oppose the country of Israel since they are not good at creating organized affluent societies.

There's lots of places Israel would have been better off for practical purposes. But it's where it is now, and the particular land IS significant. And in practice, there was no free land; drop them in Northern Australia and aborigine advocates would hate them today (even if there were insignificant numbers of aborigines in the area).

Yeah but the Aborigines complain about the current people of the Northern Territory and have way less military and cultural clout with which to complain with.

And in practice, there was no free land; drop them in Northern Australia and aborigine advocates would hate them today (even if there were insignificant numbers of aborigines in the area).

A real life example of this is Rhodesia. The highlands where most of the whites settled were sparsely populated because the native Africans were using wooden tools and the soil in the highlands was largely unworkable for them. After Mugabe took power he seized tons of white farmland on land where the natives had never lived.

Yeah I also had the thought of something akin to the Indian reservation system that US has for old tribes. They get their land, they are a semi sovereign entity within US territory. And their people can choose integration or separation. The Amish and Mennonites also are able to maintain extreme religious beliefs and a separate society within America. Orthodox Judaism seems to also have thriving communities in New York city.

I feel this describes most of the Jewish Americans that I knew in college and highschool. Especially the ethnically and culturally Jewish that did little of the actual religion part.

I think "opposed to the existence of Israel" spans a spectrum. There are people who think Israel in its present form is an oppressive ethnostate and it needs to be reformed ("reform" meaning anything from a one-state solution to a two-state solution to various other proposals that have been floated and failed over the years), and there are people who think Israel should literally cease to exist and if that means Israelis literally ceasing to exist, oh well.

Jews and other progressives who oppose Israel on moral grounds but don't actually hate Jews tend to be more of the former; they don't like Israel, but they also tend to not like the United States, or indeed the West. But they don't want to see a bloodbath, however unrealistic the alternatives they suggest.

The actual anti-Semites, of course, tend to be in the latter category, with their answer to "What about the Israelis who live there now?" ranging from "They can all move elsewhere" to "They should die."

It just seems like a doomed project to have an ethnostate and religious minority in a third world area, and neighbors with one of the most war happy religions out there. I am confused how the Israel project seemed like a good idea ever.

In all seriousness, read a few books on the topic. (I recommend reading both pro- and anti-Israel historians.) It might not convince you the Israel project was a good idea, but there are definitely reasons that made sense at the time, both ethno-religious and otherwise. Of course there were many alternative plans besides Israel itself; Uganda, Madagascar, Venezuela, and Alaska were among the proposals. It was both practical and historical reasons that lead to Israel proper being the location chosen. It may well be that it was doomed from the beginning, but for example, "Let all the Jews who want their own state move to America" was definitely not an option when the Zionist movement began in the 19th century, and it wasn't even an option for all the Jews to flee to the US after WWII.

In all seriousness, read a few books on the topic. (I recommend reading both pro- and anti-Israel historians.) It might not convince you the Israel project was a good idea, but there are definitely reasons that made sense at the time, both ethno-religious and otherwise. Of course there were many alternative plans besides Israel itself; Uganda, Madagascar, Venezuela, and Alaska were among the proposals. It was both practical and historical reasons that lead to Israel proper being the location chosen. It may well be that it was doomed from the beginning, but for example, "Let all the Jews who want their own state move to America" was definitely not an option when the Zionist movement began in the 19th century, and it wasn't even an option for all the Jews to flee to the US after WWII.

I believe you. I'm not gonna read books on the topic. My level of interest in foreign affairs tends to drop precipitously off of a cliff somewhere at the edge of my neighborhood. Its a benefit of living in the US that I dont have to understand foreign peoples and conflicts.

Im curious if you know if any of the architects of the Israel project ever expressed regret or a moment of 'whoopsie, that was the wrong place'?

I don't know that any of the founders of Israel ever regretted it (though I am not that knowledgeable about all the personalities). Certainly they knew from the beginning that it was a fraught project that might fail. They were definitely aware the Arabs didn't want them there, though the more optimistic ones thought they'd eventually reach an accommodation and normalized relations.

The thing is, they really didn't have a lot of other choices.

Despite the fact that I am usually in the role of "Israel defender" here because the Jew-haters are so tediously disingenuous and ahistorical, I actually am not particularly invested in Israel. I wish them well but I also wish the Palestinians well - my preference would be for an impossible peace. I blame the impossibility mostly on the Palestinians, but not entirely. I also don't think the US should be so heavily invested in Israel. What do they do for us, really?

But I do like to understand where both sides are coming from. For example, I completely dismiss the "This is our ancient homeland" argument because that only plays if you are religious. Otherwise, no one has a right to land just because your ancestors lived there 2000 years ago.

That said, there are a lot of lies about Israel being a "settler-colonialist" project as well.

If you don't want to read books, my favorite current media figure speaking from the Israeli POV is Havig Rettig Gur. He has a YouTube channel and he is a Free Press columnist now. He's unabashedly Zionist, but he's very articulate and a clear explainer, without any of the anti-Arab vitriol you get from some Israel-explainers.

I wish there was an equivalent on the anti-Zionist side, but aside from people like Norman Finkelstein, there aren't many who aren't just antisemites with a coat of paint.

For example, I completely dismiss the "This is our ancient homeland" argument because that only plays if you are religious. Otherwise, no one has a right to land just because your ancestors lived there 2000 years ago.

Isn't "this is our (somewhat less than) ancient homeland" also the entire argument for why the Palestinians should have primacy in the region over the Israelites?

Yeah, if you read mutual accounts of Israel/Palestine they both make a combination of plausible and risible claims about who was there first and who's been there longer.

There are Arab revisionists who claim that ancient Israel is a myth and the Jews literally never lived there at all (they focus on denying the Israel of the Old Testament and kind of ignore extensive Roman history- the Romans would have been surprised to learn there were no Jews in Palestine and Israel didn't exist). Zionist revisionists, for their part, will point out that small populations of Jews have existed in the region since antiquity, but try to link that to some unbroken lineage going back to King David.

I wish there was an equivalent on the anti-Zionist side, but aside from people like Norman Finkelstein, there aren't many who aren't just antisemites with a coat of paint.

Its this sort of statement I responded to above and what kind of bothers me. There are definitely moderates on this issue. I just get the sense that you don't get to be both a moderate and get any air time in the debate. Its a toxoplasma issue and both sides spend a lot of effort amplifying the crazies on the other side, and there is plenty of crazy to go around.

I actually am not particularly invested in Israel. I wish them well but I also wish the Palestinians well - my preference would be for an impossible peace. I blame the impossibility mostly on the Palestinians, but not entirely. I also don't think the US should be so heavily invested in Israel. What do they do for us, really?

This seems pretty close to the same position as all the moderate secular Jews i know. And pretty close to my position, with the added caveat that I blame more than just Israel's immediate neighbor. The Arab states in general seem like bad neighbors. Like maybe only above "african warlord" and "USSR" as a category of bad neighbor.

It describes me, that's for sure. Israel doesn't have a right to exist actually, it has a right to try to exist; and I don't think my country should be there permanent backstop. Israel can lay in the bed it's made.

That said I would happily welcome all the jews living there not just to my country but into my state and neighborhood; the ones I disagree with politically seem like problem gamblers. Maybe if they weren't in the middle east they'd stop doing things that look so bad.

It's not conclusive -- absent mind-reading capacity, I don’t want to convict anyone, even in my mind, of anti-Semitism. But one guideline I like to use when evaluating a vocally anti-Israel person is "have I ever heard them voice concern about human rights in Sudan, or Iran, or Belarus, or indeed Gaza? Or is it only the failings of one government that they object to?" There are people who pass this test. Not many, I would say.

You probably havent heard someone criticizing human rights in those countries because its not controversiel and no one tries to make you lose your job or blacklist you.

Zionists first came for Ms Rachel after she mentioned Gaza in a fundraiser for save the children (where she also mentioned Sudan and Congo). She has since increased her focus on Gaza (but she also posts regularly about Sudan) because that is what people do when they are being silenced for doing something than any decent person should find entirely uncontroversial.

You probably havent heard someone criticizing human rights in those countries because its not controversiel and no one tries to make you lose your job or blacklist you.

This doesn't make any sense. If there is little or nothing in the way of negative consequences for criticizing the human rights situation in countries X, Y, and Z, one would expect -- all things being equal -- to hear MORE criticism of those countries.

or indeed Gaza

The dead giveaway is that the people ostensibly most concerned about Palestinian welfare (most of whom tend to present themselves as opposed to Hamas) tend to be the quietest when Palestinians are oppressed or victimised by anyone who isn't an Israeli, including Hamas themselves. "No Jews, no news", as the saying goes.

That being said, epistemic bubbles are absolutely a thing:

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

To the extent that I think Israel's military goals in Gaza were defensible, this is probably a criticism which applies to me.

My friend once said, "I get more liberal the farther away you are". Everyone's concerned about the Palestinians, but no one wants to save the Palestinians. Even less charitably, a good chunk of them are just circlejerking around the "current thing". Antisemitism may be losing its meaning, but so is Zionism. You have to believe that Epstein was Mossad's blackmail kingpin holding US elite by their predaphile balls and that Israel offed Charlie Kirk for... reasons, or you're a philosemitic goycuck. No matter your reservations with Israel's warmongering government and support for West Bank settlers.

No matter your reservations with Israel's warmongering government and support for West Bank settlers.

The people who claim to be agains this but spend 10x the amount of time complaining about antisemitism are not credible.

I supposed it comes down to where you care to expend your attention, but we can just as easily invert the litmus test at the people who uncritically circulate the hare brained conspiracies I mentioned. Are they more credible?

The point of being vocal is to change something that you can affect in the world. Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan. But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving. That would have been cool.

Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan

This seems like the opposite of correct. You could almost certainly stop human rights abuses in Belarus and Sudan with decent sized cash payments (totally not bribes). There is a plausible military path to regime change in Iran wherein a non-human rights violating government comes to power.

The only plausible path to ending human rights abuses in Palestine is by doing one big, quick, human rights abuse and shoving them all into boats and dropping them off somewhere they are not near lots of Jews. Madagascar has been floated elsewhere in this thread in other contexts. Works well for this plan.

It’s at best highly speculative that you could bribe Sudan to stop their civil war, whereas it’s obviously correct that we could have withheld our alliance to Israel (and threatened sanctions) and thus stopped the mass starvation of children. Also, America allocated 300mil to famine relief in Sudan

Withholding support from Israel doesn't mitigate the problem that they have a bunch of hostiles in land adjacent to them that use children as human shields, both literally and nutritionally.

Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan

They absolutely can, they generally choose not to. It's not like it would even be surprising if progressives took up Sudan as a major cause du jour and demanded change! And yet.

Do you mean by being the world police? I don’t think the progressives upset about world events want American soldiers to police these places, they just don’t want America to throw their support and money behind them.

Also that we clearly have affected Iran, quite recently. Not in a way that progressives want this time, but we "can" if we choose to.

But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving.

I would still love to see evidence for these hundreds of thousands of Gazan children who starved. Most pro-Palestine people seemed to quietly drop that specific claim after the UN were forced to walk back the most explosive framing of it.

https://www.rescue.org/press-release/children-gaza-need-protection-hunger-and-injuries-surge-irc-data-shows

Polling indicated that 1 in 3 children in Gaza during the height of the blockade went full days without eating. There are 600,000 Gazans under 10 years old, meaning that 200,000 children were consciously starved by the Jewish State during the food blockaid.

No, it says that one in three children under 3 went a full day without eating in the past 24 hours (kind of an oddly phrased question, but whatever).

We can make reasonable extrapolations from this poll:

  • A family with limited food is not going to single out their youngest child to go without eating; the human instinct is to feed the youngest and most vulnerable. If children under 3 are going a full day without eating, then this is at minimum how long every child is going without eating. The youngest is who needs to eat the most frequently.

  • This poll wasn’t conducted on a day with a particularly limited amount of food, but sampled on a random day. This means they are continually going full days without eating.

  • Doctors who worked in Gaza have confirmed this: Mark Brauner, Tom Adamkiewicz, Nick Maynard, Joanne Perry. (These are the non-Muslim names).

Do you deny that this is starvation?

I don't deny that it's starvation, but I'm unconvinced that Israel is solely to blame for this state of affairs. I read several articles independently claiming that Hamas were seen stealing aid packages and selling them to fund their war effort.

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Well, if you can claim 6 million dead, historically that's enough for European powers to feel obligated enough to you to give you a piece of the Near East after the fact as repentance.

Clearly, the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again, but this time it's the Great Satan (the US) getting in the way of the historic, millennium-old European Peoples' tradition of dictating who controls Judea.

Clearly, the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again

Do what again? Award a group a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people were killed? Which group has seen 6 million of their people killed recently?

Well, there was that time the most powerful EU member nation killed a bunch of the people currently occupying the Holy Land back in the early 1940s.

The survivors of that purge had taken that land, formerly administered by Britain (the second-biggest loser of WW2) by 1948.

You're referring to the Holocaust, I get that. When you said "the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again" I interpreted that to mean "the pro-Palestine people are asking the EU to award them a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people have been killed". But 6 million of their people haven't been killed. Or did I misinterpret you?

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in many cases, anti-Zionism is the motte and antisemitism is the bailey.

This strikes me as very likely in some cases

After all, if anti-Zionists were really only opposed to the state of Israel, you would logically expect them to be the first to condemn attacks on the Jewish diaspora, and in the loudest possible terms: after all, if they believe that a dedicated Jewish state is not necessary to ensure the safety of Jews, they should be the ones most opposed to attacks on Jews outside of Israel.

I don't see how any of this is logical at all actually.

I have no problem with Jews, I admire their culture. Frankly, any culture that prizes educational attainment and hard work is desperately needed given how hard the West is abandoning these values.

I think the state of Israel, while in a very shitty neighborhood, is going absolutely ham to a degree that is impossible to support ethically. There are many examples of the various attrocities they have recently inflicted on Palestinians (rape, violence, blah blah blah). Also fun stuff like death penalty laws that only apply to Palestinians. Or the entire concept of West Bank settlements and the Swiss cheesing of that area. Or how gaza is levelled and the ~2mil ppl there are now pressed into less than 50% of the pre 2023 land area. It goes on...

Of course, the Palestinians, and the Arab Muslim world at large, are terrible neighbors and have inflicted lots of attrocities back on Isreal. I dislike them as well.

So in sum, I dislike everyone in that area, and I hope they resolve their problems (they never will). If I meet a Jew in real life, I'll shake their hand and hope I can get invited to Shabbat because I'm a slut for Challah.

But I also think the state of Israel is being run by essentially cartoon villains and I absolutely do not support them.

I don't understand why I have to yell loudly about not liking violence against Jews forever to demonstrate that I'm "one of the good ones". I don't like violence against Jews, people shouldn't be violent ahainst them. I dislike violence against most people.

There are many examples of the various attrocities they have recently inflicted on Palestinians (rape, violence, blah blah blah).

Apart and beyond the usual level of such atrocities in any military?

Or how gaza is levelled and the ~2mil ppl there are now pressed into less than 50% of the pre 2023 land area.

What would be a more effective way to clear out Hamas bases and tunnels that are deeply embedded within civilian infrastructure, without putting your own soldiers at risk? I'm genuinely curious -- I have not been able to get a single good answer to this that isn't simply "Well, don't."

What would be a more effective way to clear out Hamas bases and tunnels that are deeply embedded within civilian infrastructure, without putting your own soldiers at risk?

Good faith Marshall plan Gaza or actually genocide it fr.

You can't "Marshall plan Gaza" when the aid money is just going to get funneled into Hamas.

As for "actually genocide it fr",

I think the state of Israel, while in a very shitty neighborhood, is going absolutely ham to a degree that is impossible to support ethically.

You would start ethically supporting Israel if they went even further than doing things that you find impossible to ethically support?

I don't support them genociding Gaza, I just think it's basically one of ~two "effective" (as in, actually stops the two groups from doing everything they can to fuck with each other) options for actually ending this conflict.

Ok, so then what realistic and fair option do you actually support for ending this conflict?

I provided the two viable options I see before us.

To be clear, I do not think it is possible to achieve a "realistic and fair" solution that both parties will agree to. There's so much hostility and bad blood and history that I genuinely do not think this will ever end.

The Palestinians will suffer and occasionally lash out, the Israelis will crush them and keep them contained/mow the grass.

I anticipate, barring some black swan event, that when I die the status quo will be similar to now

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My point (made more eloquently in the linked article; I'm drunkenly paraphrasing) is that there are a lot of people who would never dream of suggesting that a hate crime targeting e.g. black people might be justified because of how a group of black people behaved in a different country. But when a hate crime targets Jews minding their own business in a country other than Israel, these same people will outright state that such violence is "only to be expected" in light of the actions of Israel (even if the targeted Jews don't hold Israeli citizenship, have never set foot in the country and have personally expressed discomfort with IDF military tactics).

A person who is opposed to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds but who harbours no ill will towards Jews would presumably condemn anti-Semitic violence outside of Israel just as loudly as they condemn anti-black hate crimes, gay bashing etc. The fact that they tend not to do this, but rather will excuse or justify the violence in question, rather suggests that their motivating impulse is something other than a philosophical opposition to the existence of the Jewish state.

there are a lot of people who would never dream of suggesting that a hate crime targeting e.g. black people might be justified because of how a group of black people behaved in a different country

Not only would a lot of people never dream of suggesting that, the US even has a government agency that supposedly coerces people into making explicit statements regarding the denial of race as a factor in crimes committed against their families.

Ohhhh I understand, thank you

Modern leftist anti-semitism is not historical antisemitism. It’s an offshoot of DEI, blacklivesmatter, woke, anti white beliefs that have grown on the left. Jews are compared to normal whites even richer and more successful. And of course they mostly have white skin. Same with anti-Zionism on the left it’s fundamentally the same as anti-colonialism leftism. Unfortunately the Jews largely backed those beliefs for decades while not realizing that eventually Ashkenazi Jews have extremely high IQ on average and win more than anyone else is modern neoliberalism and this anti-whitism logic would eventually turn on them.

And yes Israel was colonialism or probably even closer to apartheid than colonialism in N America. Except they did it historically in the 20th century. N America for the most part displaced few people as it was sparsely populated similar to Argentina. Modern Ashkenazis are as much Italians as they are genetically related to the historical people of Israel. Their richer, smarter, and better at military than the people who lived in Palestine and conquered Israel in the 20th century.

I’ve got no problem with Israel except when they act against my interests. The ADL was one of the biggest promoters of anti-whitism which has now turned on their own people.

blacklivesmatter

Sometimes it amazes me that the BLM crowd is so content to throw their weight behind the Palestine crowd, elements of which are also funding actual genocides of Black people in Sudan and Nigeria. But the self-centered-ness of the political activist class isn't that surprising, I guess.

Modern leftist anti-semitism is not historical antisemitism.

I agree with the larger point, but keep in mind "leftist anti-semitism" includes Muslim antisemitism too (meeting historical antisemitism criteria), which is given a more anodyne, anti-colonialist twist to be palatable to their white liberal peers.

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