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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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No, not quite correctly.

  1. In the 1940s, the area was populated by a handful of Jews and many Arabs. They owned their respective property; Arabs were presumably in the majority, and in particular sufficiently densely distributed that there was no viable contiguous Jewish state that could be founded on Jewish property.

  2. Thereupon, Jewish colonists with Anglo-American backing started entering the area and killing and expelling the Arabs. Without these actions, the "war of independence" (which was really a unilateral war of aggression) could not have been won. This created a sort of "original sin" that is so recent that it has not met my statute of limitations.

  3. Israel continues doing the same thing (killing Arabs, expelling them from their land and settling it). Israel is a democracy (as its supporters are enthusiastic to point out). Therefore, sins analogous to the "original sin" are newly committed by the Israeli state with popular consent with regularity.

I'm not as hung up on hospitals as you seem to be, though I would like to point out that Russia is regularly condemned for attacking Ukrainian dual-use infrastructure (including hospitals) that is likewise used by the Ukrainian military and still manages to have produced a far lower number of civilian casualties in Ukraine than Israel has among its enemies. This seems like pretty strong evidence that Israel is unusually happy to cause civilian casualties.

Either way, nothing about this requires even talking about whether they are justified to blow up hospitals or anyone else is! Even ignoring the tens of thousands of skulls, 1-3 alone amounts to an obvious moral case for returning what was stolen. If Israel relinquishes all land that was not owned by Jews in 1940, we can talk about who and what they are allowed to destroy in defense of what's left.

The only relevance that the "original sin" has to evaluating Israel's other actions (including blowing up hospitals) is that Israel habitually defends its ongoing violence and theft against the Arabs with violence committed by Arabs against them. Commonly, notions of legitimate self-defense are understood to only cover unprovoked actions. You can't attack and rob someone, have them strike you in self-defense, and then justify further aggression against them as self-defense against the preceding act.

Of course I have heard the "tax dollars" argument before. But if this were the reason for the ferocious and relentless criticism of Israel out there, one would expect Europeans to be far less anti-Israel than Americans. That's not the case at all. "Tax dollars" is an excuse, not the actual reason.

This argument is nonsensical. There is no reason to assume that the total volume of possible outrage at atrocities committed elsewhere is the same in every country. If the amount of "tax dollars" has any relevance at all, at most you might argue that it determines the relative scale of our responsibility for Israel's actions, compared to other atrocities being committed with our monetary support - and there, I think there might be a good case that even though US support for Israel is in absolute terms much larger than ours, in relative terms there is comparatively more other immoral behaviour that American money pays for. It could be that 30% of all atrocities funded by EU military budget are Israeli and 10% of all atrocities funded by US military budget are, but the latter quantity is still much larger in monetary terms.