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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24370 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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The MOU Homesick Blues

Over the last two days, Donald Trump and JD Vance have been selling their embryonic Iran Deal to the American public and to the world. Trump has said, among other things:

  • Hamas is behaving very well these days.
  • Iran should have missiles. Why not?
  • We're going to unfreeze Iran's money. It's their money. Why should we steal their money?
  • If the war kept going there would have been an economic catastrophe. So we had to end it.
  • Some of the guys in the Islamic regime are really nice.
  • If Iran didn't open the Strait of Hormuz our oil reserves would have run out in 4 weeks. We had to make a deal.
  • Netanyahu is crazy. They keep killing innocent civilians. He needs to be more responsible.
  • Without me and America, Israel wouldn't exist.

Directly he states:

“The alternative to this deal was a global recession. There are stupid people who want to see a global recession. They are just stupid people. The Strait of Hormuz would never have been opened."

Along with this banger

“I think [Israel] could do better … I'm not saying they shouldn't protect themselves. I'm saying when two drones are shot into the desert and drop harmlessly, you don't have to knock down buildings in Beirut. They could behave better…”

JD has said:

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have left. 2/3 of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars. The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump, and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the President of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in”

"Do I think there are people within Israeli society who would like to turn Iran into Libya, basically a failed state with 90 million people? Probably."

"What is your exact proposal? You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have."

Israeli ministers have been striking out against the deal

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn! With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit. All of Lebanon must burn. Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF, and this commitment takes precedence over every other consideration. I told the Prime Minister, even in our private meetings: For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. Enough with the ping-pong. In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint—you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.

The entire first line of Lebanese villages has been destroyed. We are destroying all the houses. The residents will never see them standing before their eyes again.

Now reports are coming in that Israel does not consider itself bound by the MOU, and intends to keep bombing Lebanon without reference to it.

The IRGC has stated today:

“Since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, the complete lifting of the naval blockade, and the withdrawal of American terrorist forces from the Persian Gulf and the region are among the main conditions of the agreement between Iran and the United States. The Strait of Hormuz will remain closed until these conditions are met. All ships are requested, for the sake of their security and safety, not to approach the Strait of Hormuz. Any vessel that defies this directive will be targeted.”

With the United States executive committed to the MOU, and Israel committed to the opposite policy, Yeshiva World News reports:

Israeli officials told Maariv that Trump’s demands are not merely theoretical and that issues concerning Lebanon, Syria, and the Syrian Hermon were raised in recent discussions with Netanyahu, adding that the prime minister made it clear that Israel will not agree to withdrawing from its security positions in the north. A senior Israeli official told Reuters that Israel is carrying out “stubborn negotiations” with the US on maintaining its military presence in southern Lebanon and has no intention of backing down. The officials warned that the messages coming from Washington are no longer limited to difficult discussions. The US is signaling that if Israel continues to insist on its position, it will consider practical measures, ranging from delays in weapons shipments to restrictions on operational assistance, and even more severe steps that could potentially amount to a de facto arms embargo.

So, what now?

How does the USA navigate this problem with its erstwhile ally?

Part of me feels very strongly, the patriotic Toby Keith, regardless of your feelings about US policy or about this administration, that we can't have our president get cucked like that on the world stage. Trump has publicly signed, endorsed, justified, sold the MOU. He's stated clearly that it is necessary to the interests of the United States in maintaining the global economy. If Israel is our ally, our greatest ally, then they can't be allowed to do this to us. They can't insult and undermine the clear foreign policy of the POTUS and be allowed to do so. From the beginning I've said that Israeli forces, inasmuch as they are allied to the USA, should be under the command of an American general, Spartan style. They can't be allowed to go against us and continue to suck off the teat of the American taxpayer.

So plan trusters, antisemities, pro-Palestinians, shitlibs, anyone. Where do we go from here with Israel? What happens next? How can you, as the American President, allow your ally to undermine your own clearly stated foreign policy goals and, in your own opinion, wreck the world economy? At this point in the process what pressure can even be put on Iran?

This feels bad.

We should encourage Israelis to forget about their ancestral homeland and resettle in Florida and start a new defense hub with a specialty in cyber arms. Also maybe try to improve the food situation.

We should encourage Israelis to forget about their ancestral homeland and resettle in Florida

I floated even more ambitious plan couple years back:
https://www.themotte.org/post/705/israelgaza-megathread-1/147305?context=8#context

Sounds like the MCRN from the expanse, except they're Israeli now. Seems like a recipe for Earth-Mars perpetual cold war.

There's a latam conspiracy theory that the IDF is scouting for a plan b settlement in western argentina. Maybe that's why Peter Thiel is looking to get an argentinian citizenship, he's trying to get on the ground floor of Neo Jerusalem 2.

The slavs have a conspiracy theory about them doing this in Ukraine. Everyone has a conspiracy theory about the Jews building backup Israel on their land.

If they would still be subject to U. S. immigration law, it's a non-starter. In the event that some other country starts persecuting its Jewish population, they can move to Israel under Chok ha-Shvut; a homeland under the jurisdiction of the goyim would be tempted to refuse them entry on the usual grounds, as occurred prior to the Second World War.

Should the Hutu and Tutsi have ethno-states? What about the Yazidi, or the Kurds? The Rohingya? The Germans? Different Amerindian groups across the Americas? Given that Israel exists now, and destroying it would be a humanitarian catastrophe, I think it aught to continue. At the same time, I don't think being subject of a genocide and/or ethnic cleansing entitles a group to an ethno-state in perpetuity. That interest has to be balanced against other interests.

I don't think being subject of a genocide and/or ethnic cleansing entitles a group to an ethno-state in perpetuity.

A single incident does not justify a perpetual ethno-state; however, the Jewish people have been subjected to a long, long, pattern of persecution, and were unable to escape after the implementation of modern border controls in the wake of the First World War. If we were still in the Phileas-Fogg-era system, or Nathan Robinson's ideal, Am Yisrael might be a bit less worried, knowing that they could always take their packed suitcases to somewhere more tolerant.

Jewish people have been subjected to a long, long, pattern of persecution, and were unable to escape after the implementation of modern border controls in the wake of the First World War.

Jews are also one of the oldest ethnoreligious groups in the world, and I'm pretty sure by far the oldest that has spent most of it's time as a merchant minority. Once you take those factors into account, I don't think their history indicates that they are currently or in the near future will be predictably in more danger as Jews than other merchant minorities. Armenians are in the same boat, if you look at the past 100 years.

I specifically mentioned a lot of the above groups since many of them faced persecution in the very recent past. The Hutu and Tutsi were butchering each other as late as the 2000s in the Congo. Rather than try and force a Hutu or Tutsi ethnostate, you have largely had a stop to the massacres by changes in government policy and culture instead.

Asking for an ethnostate is a pretty big ask; it's asking for all people in a given territory to either leave or be ok with the state and culture being made to service the needs of a particular group of inhabitants of an area often at the expense of other inhabitants. While sometimes it is the lesser of two evils, such as some post WW1 and WW2 settlements, it's always at best the lesser of two evils. Typically the other evil has to be brutal international war and/or crimes against humanity.

Asking for the establishment of an ethnostate, rather than just the maintenance of once which is a far more moderate and reasonable ask, is so extreme that if Israel didn't exist today I would object to it. Given Israel already exists, it should not be destroyed since that would require great tragedy, but it doesn't have a right to exist in perpetuity given all that goes into an ethnostate. No nation does.

it doesn't have a right to exist in perpetuity given all that goes into an ethnostate. No nation does.

That's a lot of assumptions you have there. One could more easily make the argument that, granting that nations exist and have a right to exist, ethnostates must by necessity also exist to actually enforce that right.

If they would still be subject to U. S. immigration law

By "We should encourage" I assume dr_analog meant passing legislation that would explicitly make immigration from Israel easier, not just sending them postcards with a suggestion.

passing legislation that would explicitly make immigration from Israel easier

Not good enough. Jewish people fleeing anti-Semitic persecution, under Dr Analog's proposal, would still have to play Mother-May-I with a Gentile immigration officer legally empowered to say "The persecution you're fleeing isn't that bad, and we think you might be moving for economic reasons/you might cost us more money than you pay in taxes/you had minor brushes with the law in your youth/the records where you're coming from are incomplete and we can't be certain that you aren't a murderer; therefore you're going back whence you came, and if you end up in a mass grave, we'll make a bunch of really sad movies about your plight in fifty years or so."

I don't understand why you're now on round two of using any possible ambiguity in a statement to imagine a needlessly weaksauce implementation. The legislation could look like anything up to and including automatically granting American citizenship to any Israeli who asks for it, or indeed just granting all living Israelis American citizenship upfront. Is this likely to happen? No, but dr_analog was not trying to predict the future: the original post was simply "We should…".

Granting US citizenship to current Israeli citizens would be legally easy (politically nightmarish and unthinkable, but that's different question) as one time special and exceptional act that does not have to conform with normal US immigration laws and practices.

@Celestial-body-NOS was talking about non-US, non-Israeli Jews. Israel was established as safe haven for all Jews in the world. To duplicate this, US would have to also establish Law of Return and credibly promise to keep it for all eternity.

In such situation, US immigration authorities would now have to decide who is a "Jew" for the purpose of return, easy to understand why even the most philosemitic person would not want to go there.

Is that not what we’ve been doing?

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