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Notes -
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:
Directly he states:
Along with this banger
JD has said:
Israeli ministers have been striking out against the deal
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:
With the United States executive committed to the MOU, and Israel committed to the opposite policy, Yeshiva World News reports:
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.
In the long term, I increasingly feel that the only hope for Israel is that whoever first invents and controls ASI (Amodei, Altman, maybe Brin and Page) takes pity on their co-ethnics and/or purported homeland.
Otherwise the geopolitical situation is bad, the demographics are bad, the reputation is bad. Israel was a fool’s errand. You can’t stand against two billion Muslims forever, especially as they stream into Western lands in ever higher numbers and grow to be politically prominent there, too. As Scott has said so many times, only a small number of people have to really care about an issue to get their way if most people don’t care about it, and Muslims care about Palestine as much as Jews care about Israel and are far more numerous. The Iranian state succeeded in its central ideological mission of making Palestine the central, primary ideological cause (by far) of two billion people, 25% of the world’s population. No cunning, no chutzpah, no number of places on the Forbes billionaires list can stand up to that.
The only possibility was gambling that the easy prosperity and trade ties that had persuaded the Gulf Arabs into reducing their hostility could be replicated in an Iran in which the revolutionary regime was defeated, and that possibly as a consequence over many decades hostility toward Israel could be reduced. The Mossad judged that, after the recent widespread protests, a killing blow to the ayatollah and IRGC and cabinet elite, plus using Claude and image recognition to dynamically identify and track police stations, local pro-regime militiamen and troop movements and strike them with air superiority, would bring the people back to the streets in a way the government could not crush. That gamble clearly failed. The highest risk tolerance protestors were already arrested or killed. The rest stayed home. The Iranian middle class are simply too comfortable to rebel in a way that threatens, for most of them, their lives. Most of us would do what they did, which is nothing.
What more is there to say? The decline may be fast or slow, maybe both. You can’t hold out against the world forever, surrounded by enemies.
Israel in it's present location might have been. An Israel almost anywhere else, probably including one carved out of a German state as reparations for the war, would have been perfectly fine.
While I enjoy fiction like the Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I don’t think an Israel anywhere else would have survived either. There were two very large waves of migration that have given the state the necessary human mass to survive (especially given the workshy chareidi population, which for lack of good alternatives probably would have migrated in large numbers to any Jewish state with religious freedom) - the Mizrachi migration and the Soviet migration.
The former wouldn’t have happened without Israel being located where it is (I don’t think the Jewish population of the Middle East would remain particularly large, but like the Christian one it would slowly have trickled out over time due to persecution, mostly to the West, maybe some to Latin America and Asia). The latter would never have happened, because an Israel located in eg (West) Germany would have been in the more discrete enemy category for the USSR than Israel and so emigration would be much less likely to be allowed (yes, some Soviet Jews went to the US, but they usually pretended they’d go to Israel first).
I also don’t think, even in their anger, any of the allies or even many Jewish leaders would have agreed it was structurally stable to carve out a corner of densely populated West (and it would have been West) Germany, ethnically cleanse the natives and establish some kind of Jewish ethnostate. Yes, the Ostsiedler were ethnically cleansed, but that was behind the Iron Curtain, in the chaos of the postwar period, and by countries with tens of millions of people in an empire with hundreds of millions of people.
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