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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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I'm not sure how this plays into your standards of justice, but I do think it's worth noting.

It doesn't play in at all, because I'm talking about setting a state on something higher than Jewish ethnicity. And that aside, if they were refugees, then they did the equivalent of Syrian refugees setting up a Caliphate in Europe.

I think you need to clarify what you mean by "they" here. I mean, let's suppose that the initial founding of Israel in 1948 was unjust by some standard. Does that mean that the Israel of 2026 is illegitimate? That Israel is tainted forever?

Of course not, it's the ship of Theseus. However, the question of whether Israel is really still Israel is one for the next century, given that Netanyahu is a single year younger than the state he leads.

As a point of information, it's worth noting that (1) there has always been a significant Christian Arab population alongside the Muslim Arab population, at least until recently until the Christians started getting chased out in large numbers;

Okay, read it as the Arabs in Palestine, their religion doesn't matter to me.

(2) a lot of the Palestinian Arabs are the descendants of Arabs who migrated internally within the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries from places like what are now Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. That's why it's common for Palestinian Arabs to have names like "Masri" which means Egypt.

This also doesn't matter to me. I didn't say Israel is uniquely evil, in fact. I implied it's mundane. The farce is that an amazing effort has gone into establishing a mundane state, one that is not morally better than the Muslims living there before.

If there were a Jewish colony on Mars which eventually became successful and prosperous, you can bet that there would be a lot of outrage over it. People would accuse the Jews of invading and seizing land which should be the common property of all mankind.

I doubt they would be piqued for the same reason as me, but for me it is the issue of, it is a waste of scarce land that it should go to a vanity state for a micro-ethnicity that failed to have a state for 2000 years.