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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4603 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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Compare Northern Ireland with Israel and the difference is massive. Northern Ireland is safe while Israel is still at war.

I don't think you're comparing apples with oranges.

  1. Read the mission statements for the IRA, the UVF, the UDA and every other paramilitary organisation in the North. Conspicuous by its absence will be any explicit declaration of intent to completely exterminate the opposing ethnic group. The same cannot be said of Hamas's founding charter. It's extremely difficult to do business with a rival ethnic group who simply want your entire ethnic group dead. How do you come to a compromise? ("Okay – you can have your own state and only kill half of us"?)
  2. There were moderate leaders on both sides (e.g. John Hume and David Trimble) of the Troubles who were willing and able to work together to find a compromise. Every would-be moderate Palestinian leader has good reason to believe he'll be assassinated by one of his own side if he ever dilutes his maximal hatred and distrust of Jews one iota.
  3. The inability to compromise inevitably results in Palestinian leaders turning down offers far more generous than any offered to Northern Irish Catholics. At no point in the Troubles was complete ceding of territory from the UK to Ireland ever even considered never mind offered, and John Hume and Gerry Adams knew this going into negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement. Meanwhile, Palestinian leaders have been offered their own state at least three times in the last fifty years and turned it down every time. These would strike me as a transparent example of cutting one's nose to spite one's face if you accept the Palestinian leaders' claims at face value that they only want their own state and a "right of return" or similar.
  4. As odious as some of the IRA's tactics were, they pale in comparison to Hamas's. It's not easy to ask someone to swallow their pride and bury the hatchet with someone who killed your cousin, but it can and has been done. Asking someone to bury the hatchet with someone who murdered your cousin and violated her corpse is a much harder ask.

I also question the way you're laying 100% of the blame for the sad state of affairs at Israel's fault. I mean, when you include bangers like

an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group

Like, even if I concede that this description applies to the Jews in Israel – surely you must concede that, at the minimum, it also applies to the Palestinian Arabs? If nothing else, Jews in Israel can peacefully co-exist with each other (Israel is a significant outlier in the middle East for having experienced zero civil wars since 1948). Palestinian Arabs are such basket cases that they don't even get along with other Arabs, and inevitably end up starting civil wars whenever they're admitted into neighbouring Arab countries. If you want to say that peace in Israel and Palestine is impossible because there are two competing ethnic groups who both follow "an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group", I could understand where you were coming from. But the idea that this description only applies to the Jews and not to the Muslim Palestinians is just laughable on its face.

(Israel is a significant outlier in the middle East for having experienced zero civil wars since 1948)

This is a little unfair; as you note, Jordan's civil war was with the Palestinians, and labeling that "civil" while Israeli/Palestinian conflicts are not is defensible but a bit arbitrary.

Anyway, if it's so difficult for Jews to co-exist, it would be great if they could just... have their own country which other people could avoid, right? They could even build a wall to separate them from the other groups so there's no trouble. Of course, we know how that turned out. (and it ignores the Israeli Arabs, who don't seem to be particularly worse off than minorities in many other nations)

This is a little unfair; as you note, Jordan's civil war was with the Palestinians, and labeling that "civil" while Israeli/Palestinian conflicts are not is defensible but a bit arbitrary.

This is a reasonable objection, but even leaving aside these marginal examples there have been a lot of civil wars, revolutions etc. just in the past eight decades.

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