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I’ve been meaning to write out my full thoughts on Israel Palestine for a while, and as rhetoric heats up around election season, I figured now is as good a time as any.
First off, so that I don’t keep anyone guessing, let me state my position right off the bat. I don’t care. I would love nothing more than for the I/P conflict to be treated by the media like the much bloodier Sudanese civil war – a few words of condolence during the rare slow news cycle, then shutting up. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in, and it seems we’re destined to listen to the same hyperbolic arguments from both sides over and over instead of news that’s relevant to our lives. So, that being the case, let’s look at the conflict.
A - There is no peaceful solution. You have two groups of people that have a multi-generational blood feud going. While there might be people on both sides that want peace, there are enough that want war to ensure that war will continue. Short of separating the groups for a generation until the memories of dead relatives die out, there is no way to end this peacefully.
B - Israel is in deep trouble. The original framework of support for Israel was US/Western World in favor (out of a combination of guilt and wanting to spread democracy), communist world against (mainly for reasons of optics/opposing western imperialism, etc).
Unfortunately for Israel, the cold war ended. For the American left, they are an easy scapegoat. The “America Bad” fifth column faction of the left has a long history of hating them for cold war reasons. Given that the factions that have joined together to make up the new left (identity group tribalists + various flavors of communists) don’t have any real reason to oppose this, hating Israel makes a for a great rallying cry among groups that historically have had a REALLY hard time finding common ground (LGBTQ & Muslims, etc). And as the American left goes, so goes Europe and the rest of the Anglosphere.
As for the American right, they seem to have lost any interest in the US maintaining international hegemony. As far as I can tell, the main effect of the social media age on the right has been to break down any sort of trust they once had in American institutions. I will be the first to admit that some of those institutions have been marred by leftist politics. But the net outcome seems to be that the right now sees ALL government peripheral institutions as inherently corrupt and not worth the cost of upkeep (which, to my mind, is the antithesis of conservatism, but that is a different discussion). Needless to say, satellite states are now within the realm of things they no longer want to pay for.
Finally, there’s Israel itself. Its secular population is declining at the same rate as the rest of the developed world. And its fundamentalists are procreating faster than almost anyone else on the planet. Within another generation, they will be the majority. They’ll have full control of everything, including a reputedly large and advanced nuclear arsenal. At which point, I’d imagine that what remains of the secular population will flee, and we will see yet another theocratic state arise in the land of milk and honey.
C - The Palestinians are utterly doomed. There is no scenario where they come out of this well. The BEST case scenario is that they somehow get integrated into the surrounding Arab countries, and are spread thinly enough that there is no repeat of the Black September uprising. But in general, the conditions that the Palestinians have been subject to has made them into a vengeful and violent people, and I don’t know what country would be willing to risk taking them in.
Short of that, every road leads to death. If Israel becomes a true, North Korea style pariah state lead by fundamentalists, then there will be little to stop them from ACTUALLY committing genocide. If the modern equilibrium holds, an increasingly aggressive Israel will continue to whittle away at the Palestinian population and territory until there is nothing left. If somehow the gulf states unite and defeat Israel militarily, given the horrific deaths the Israelis would likely meet at the hands of an invading Arab army, I have little doubt that Israel would elect to glass the entire region.
And in the end, I don’t think any of these outcomes (except maybe the one with the mass nuclear exchange) are going to have much more of an effect on the western world than the Sudanese civil war, or the oppression of the Uighurs, or the various coups in Burma. Except for the fact that, due to some quirks of history, we are doomed to hear about it forever.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews are not like Christian fundamentalists. Christian fundamentalists generally have the skills necessary to survive in industrial first world societies without outside support, because if they did not, there would not be Christian fundamentalists anymore. That means their leadership has the normal leadership abilities that would enable them to lead their societies overall- perhaps less well or more corruptly, but they could do it, whereas it's not clear that grand rebbes have any such ability, because they're hereditary cult leaders who trade votes for welfare fraud.
Instead, the religious Zionists will probably run Israel. They already kind of do, and sure they're more corrupt than the left would be, but Israel isn't falling apart. And they have a barely lower fertility rate than the haredim.
I'm not convinced that lacking the ability to run a modern state is enough of an impediment to prevent a group from trying to run a modern state. Look no further than the Taliban.
In any case, I suspect the arrangement that exists between the religious Zionists and the Haredi sects can only exist as long as there is a secular state there to exploit. Once that is diminished, things will come to a head rather quickly.
Afghanistan is a medieval kingdom that happens to exist in the 21st century and not really a modern state; in fact ‘state’ is a word that doesn’t necessarily apply. The taliban can govern that state through handwritten notes and beatings. Israël cannot be.
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