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Notes -
Balaji/Network State v Malaysia
Not sure how much this one is escaping beyond the SEA-sphere. Balaji's Network State is a large adult daycare/startup incubator based in Forest City, Malaysia. Forest City is a favorite of travel youtubers, but essentially is a Chinese-backed City development approximately an hour from Singapore, in Malaysia. It was supposed to have a population of 1 million or so, but due to a combination of capital controls, wobbles in the Chinese economy and shifts in legislation has been woefully underpopulated since completion. A few years ago, the Malaysian government decided to try and salvage sunk cost by providing a relatively-inexpensive golden visa pathway for buying homes there. As part of that, Balaji's Network State has taken up residence there.
The state of Malaysia that Forest City is in, Johor, has a quite-modern Sultan who owns approximately half of the real estate development. Johor is seen as essentially Singapore's hinterland in a lot of ways, and has received significant investment towards data centers and other tech manufacturing in recent years as Singapore runs out of cheap land and cheap labor. The Johor Sultan is by far the strongest state-level leader in the country, with his family being obscenely wealthy. However, Malaysian politics are frequently dragged around by the states on the Thai-Malaysian border which are very Muslim and very Malay ('Local' ethnicity. The legal inhabitants of the country are 55% Malay, 30% Chinese, 10% Indian, 5% other roughly. Also huge amounts of illegal migrant workers from Indonesia, Bangladesh etcetera but they can't vote so fuck 'em). Malaysia does not have diplomatic relations with Israel, and nominally doesn't allow Israeli citizens to enter the country.
Due to some internal politics focusing around pushing antizionism to keep the Muslim base happy, Network State has had a recent Immigration raid to check everybody is there under a legitimate passport (Which they are, since nobody is entering under Israeli docs even if they may potentially have other docs). Now Balaji is asking to meet with the PM of Malaysia as essentially equals, instead of doing the intelligent/normal thing which is shutting up for a couple months and waiting for the Federal Electorate to move their gaze elsewhere. Additionally, people inside Malaysia are really seizing on the 'digital sovereignty' ideal that Balaji espouses as proof of him wanting to create an actual seccessionist enclave, when realistically it's more about having an incubator space than that.
It’s interesting which Muslim countries care more or less about Israel, it’s often semi-arbitrary. Malaysia cares much more than Indonesia. The Maldives, for example, care more than the majority of the Sunni world, Arab or otherwise.
As you note, none of it matters, since like Russians who are still everywhere in the South of France in the summer, the kind of Israeli who actually works remote tech jobs (generally Ashkenazi and secular) almost always has another passport. Egypt gets (or got) some poorer Mizrachim who only had the Israeli passport, but that isn’t really the case in Malaysia. Even the backpackers right out of the military tend to go to Bali, Thailand or South America.
Malaysia is too strong of a state to start this kind of project in. You need a real basket case with limited central government, maybe somewhere like Haiti where you can just take over a few valleys and some coastline and chill, but the problem is that nobody wants to fly into Port au Prince so you’d need your own airport etc etc.
The problem is not any Haitian, even the most hardcore local gangs would have no chance against professional fighting force. The problem is international community, this means US+allies, who has rather zero tolerance for private filibustering.
There were such attempts in modern times, hadn't ended well.
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