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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?
I think people won't care. Or rather, leftists who visibly care will discredit themselves. Like, there's talk of international opinion, but what do you do concretely? Do you sanction Israel for what Azerbaijan just violently did with no provocation and at no cost, after naked Jewish women have been paraded, raped and murdered in the streets by savages? And while a true ethnic cleansing is not out of the question, more realistically they'll simply permanently occupy Gaza and turn it into an actual open air prison, whether after the hostages are recovered or after the stream of atrocities decreases the public tolerance for giving in to hostage tactics.
These events certainly drive home the point that Hamas is the best Palestinian ruling party that Israeli hawks could have had, to the point that intel leaks leading to this disaster should be investigated with an eye for 4D chess (nothing will be found though). This obviates the conflict over judicial reform, demonstrates to Haredim the necessity of cooperation with the secula authority and the military, builds up the momentum for war with Iran, generally accelerates the mode collapse into a far right ethnonationalist society.
From the more mainstream Palestinian side (such as there is), I think escalation now is motivated by the ongoing legitimization of Israel in the rest of the Arab world. They don't have much time left for this silliness.
I strongly doubt people actually follow this moralistic approach to war, or it is always profoundly hypocritical. No sane person ever took sides in the Karabakh conflict aside from the respective diasporas, simply because the people involved are both identical and irrelevant (and equally unpleasant) from our perspective; with Israel-Palestine there is a much stronger ingroup-outgroup dynamic, so it’s more comparable to Russia-Ukraine, in which I don’t believe any atrocity, real or imagined, would force any kind of self-reflection.
Not exactly. Armenians can at least point to their Christian history as a commonality and to the World War One-era genocide as something that many well-read Westerners have heard of. I'd guess that maybe 15% of Americans could immediately point to Armenia on a map of the world without help. When it comes to Azerbaijan, I would guess that it is more like 5%.
Also, probably because most countries never viewed Karabakh to be part of Armenia to begin with, because of Armenia's historical ties to Russia, and because Azerbaijan won both recent wars pretty quickly, Armenia did not benefit from anything even remotely approaching the amount of Western media PR that Ukraine has been getting.
Really? I'd personally think far more people would be able to identify Azerbaijan vs Armenia on a world map. Azerbaijan has the benefit of having a pointy bit sticking out into the Caspian (very memorable and easily identifiable) while Armenia really doesn't have much going for it, I'd imagine lots of people would confuse it for Georgia.
I can’t believe that you of all people are so wildly overestimating the geographical knowledge of the American populace.
Oh, I didn't mean like 30% of the American populace would be able to identify Azerbaijan, it was more like thinking 2% would be able to point to Armenia and get it right on the first try, while something like 5% would be able to do the same with Azerbaijan, my claim was (%age who get AZ correct) > (%age who get AM correct).
Besides, I never said I think the American population is uniquely dumb compared to the rest of the world, they're smarter if anything averaged over the whole rest of the world, it's more that I think modern western culture is what is bad. The hardware of westerners is fine (well, as fine as an average human's hardware can be), it's the software that's borked.
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