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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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It's not technically culture war, but Hamas has just attacked Israel en-masse, overwhelming the Iron Dome with 5000 rockets and even sending raiding parties into Israel. It looks like Haman and/or Shabak haven't done their job at all, and Israel has been caught with its pants down.

For the culture war angle, I think the biggest question is of retribution. On one hand, Israeli public will now demand a reaction that makes the ongoing Hamas attack pale in comparison. On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?

Ever since I started learning anything about the long-term relationship between Israel and Palestine, I've been unable to understand how there can be a stable equilibrium without something pretty close to ethnic cleansing. It seems to me that Bibi and others that are branded as "hard right" have come to a similar conclusion, even if they don't say as much out loud, and have pursued it by means of slow-moving settlements that inevitably provoke violence, allowing them to bolster security, pushing that cycle indefinitely to solidify Zionist state control of the region. While I won't go as far as saying that this morning's developments make Bibi happy, I think he will immediately see them as strategically useful and proceed accordingly.

I've been unable to understand how there can be a stable equilibrium without something pretty close to ethnic cleansing

You're correct and many Israelis of the hard-right and even some on the center-left have publicly lamented that Ben-Gurion didn't "finish the job of 1948" where Israel ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands in what the Palestinians refer to as "The Nakba". There was another round of ethnic cleansing during the aftermath of 1967.

Since then, the political pressure on Israel has ratched up significantly and even if international opinion is with them now, I highly doubt the West would allow forcible removal of millions of Palestinians today. More importantly, I also suspect the Palestinians would put up a lot more resistance today than their grandparents as they're far better armed and co-ordinated at a local level than they were in the 1940s or 1960s.

In addition, such a large-scale ethnic cleansing would invariably drag in Arab neighbours and kill any attempt at normalisation with Saudi Arabia and dial back the Abraham Accords. Hezbollah is also armed to the teeth and could well join the fray. So I highly doubt something like this would happen. Israel is just boxed in with no good options.