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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32801 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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So I was doing some reading on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. I was vaguely pro-Israel before with disclaimers on how both sides are bad (like most others here I presume), but I just felt more and more pro-Israel the deeper I read (I'm not trying to astroturf, this is my true feelings on the matter). The Israeli demands during the 2000 Camp David Summit seem reasonable. The Palestinian leadership seem weirdly comfortable with ridiculous conspiracy theories about Israel trying to undermine the Al-Aqsa Mosque etc. The ban on non-Muslims from the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the ban on non-Muslim prayer on the Temple Mount, are both reprehensible. Every nook I look into, it seems like I support the Israeli side and the "both sides are bad" cases that I expected to find is largely missing.

Has anyone else had the experience of their position markedly shifting as the read up on the issue? Are the Israelis just better than PR, cunningly doing bad things to the Palestinian side under the radar, while counting on that the Palestinian reaction will be performed with much worse optics? What's the best moderate Palestinian take on an acceptable solution for a workable two-state solution?

Also, what are your predictions for the evolution of the conflict. Say that the year is 2043 and condition on no end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it: what does the conflict look like then? It seems unlikely to cool anytime soon, and the long run seems like a race between Palestinian demographics and Israeli economy, where I think Israel has the upper hand, especially if they are liberal with technological mass surveillance.

What about the whole 'let's take and annex Palestinian land' element? If you look at a map from the 1930s onwards, over time the Palestinians lose more and more land. They have a very reasonable claim to all of that land that's no longer theirs, Al-Aqsa mosque, East Jerusalem and everything else. Not only was that land recently lost, there are still large numbers of Palestinians nearby who've been displaced from said land.

Are the Israelis just better than PR, cunningly doing bad things to the Palestinian side under the radar,

Yes. The Israel lobby is tremendously influential and effective. I've posted about this before, it's mostly excerpts from Mearsheimer's Israel Lobby plus some other aspects of their influence.

https://www.themotte.org/post/240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/46113?context=8#context

https://www.themotte.org/post/205/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/37000?context=8#context

Chapter 7 of said book is specifically about the Israel lobby interfering with efforts to create a peace process.

For instance after 9/11 Bush tried to pressure the Israelis to find an agreement with the Palestinians so there would be less Islamic terrorism and anger about their treatment (one of the many strategic problems Israel creates for the West). The Israelis used their influence to bully Powell and induce the President into backflipping back into knee-jerk support for whatever they were doing, plus another peace-plan that was cunningly devised to freeze the issue in such a way that they could advance 'facts on the ground' like building a security fence that enclosed yet more Palestinian territory. Some excerpts:

Shortly after the president returned to the United States, Israel tried but failed to kill Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a key Hamas leader. It was the first of seven targeted assassinations in five days. Sharon had promised Secretary of State Powell in May that Israel would stop targeted assassinations unless they involved a "ticking bomb," which was clearly not the case in this instance. Indeed, Hamas had announced the day before the attack that it was willing to renew talks about a cease-fire. Moreover, the Forward reported that at the Aqaba summit meeting Sharon had "agreed to avoid actions that might 'inflame' the situation and weaken the rookie Palestinian prime minister." Israeli commentators understood that the Israeli prime minister was now attempting to sink the Road Map.

During this entire period, the Israelis continued building settlements in the West Bank, despite American protests and despite the fact that the Road Map explicitly calls upon Israel to "freeze all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)." They also continued assassinating Palestinian leaders, sometimes at the most unhelpful moments—at least from a U.S. perspective. For example, the IDF scuttled a proposed Palestinian cease-fire on July 22, 2002, when it killed Sheik Salah Shehada, a prominent Hamas leader, and fourteen others (including nine children). The White House denounced the attack as "heavy handed" but did not force Israel to end its targeted assassinations policy.

On March 22, 2004, Israel assassinated Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin with American-made Hellfire missiles. This move was generally perceived as a serious blow to America's position in the Middle East, not only because U.S. weapons were used but also because many in the Arab world believed that the Bush administration had given Israel the green light to kill a paraplegic in a wheelchair. The Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland wrote in the wake of that killing, "With the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, no friendly foreign leader has complicated modern American diplomacy and strategy more consistently or gravely than Ariel Sharon."

I found Mearsheimer's book very convincing. It lays out nigh-endless Israeli perfidy and exploitation of the US. They make a lot of Arabs angry with the US (including Osama Bin Laden), make it hard to work together with other Arab countries, they undermine nuclear non-proliferation and incite a nuclear Iran, they receive extremely disproportionate amounts of aid, including military aid, send US technology to China, spy on the US, bear major responsibility for the Iraq War and so on. They get away with all of it due to their immense political and media influence.

The settlement issue is a counterexample, this actually reflects badly on Israel when I dig down. I guess the settlements is a way to apply pressure to show that the Arab negotiation position is only going to get worse (beyond the obvious religious dimension that seems to be the main driver). But the ethical thing is to not press the winning hand, and relations would likely have been better today if the settlements on the West Bank had been limited.

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