naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
I live in a very progressive part of the US. I had a moment earlier today when I was surrounded by some Jewish community members/friends, and they were talking about how difficult it's been at work for them this week, because they have to put up with many of their coworkers saying "horrible things" (read: things that they don't agree with regarding the recent events). These community members are the same people who went spouting all manners of progressive talking points in so many inappropriate and unnecessary contexts over the past 5 or so years, from BLM, to covid, to Trump derangement syndrome, and so many more issues.
I'm sure I wouldn't like what these people's coworkers are saying, but I find myself feeling more than ever wanting to say to these people, "So what? You can't have everyone agree with you". I guess I'm now an expert at being around people who say things that make my blood boil. I put up with progressives at work, in my social circles, in my local community events, in stores, who constantly barrage me with their unsolicited progressive message. I not only never say anything anymore, but I act as if I'm completely unbothered. As a result, I find myself having very little sympathy, but a lot of empathy for these pro Israel progressives. I'm sure the irony is completely lost on them, but it makes me wonder how certain people can go through life with so little perspective that they feel so put upon by people with different viewpoints, yet cannot fathom that they may make others feel that way with their own, and that maybe they're wrong to do so.
What are their coworkers saying that your Jewish friends think is ‘horrible’? I can’t imagine people are saying genuine pro-Hamas stuff in a progressive regular workplace in the US, this isn’t a decolonial reading circle at Columbia.
Thankful as ever it would be considered weird to discuss politics seriously in my workplace.
I can’t imagine people are saying genuine pro-Hamas stuff in a progressive regular workplace in the US, this isn’t a decolonial reading circle at Columbia.
You might need to expand your imagination, though it's mostly as @haroldbkny says, stuff about Israel being to blame because of their oppression of the Palestinians. Me, I stay out of that, if there's going to be sectarian violence between the Muslims and the Jews at the workplace, I don't want to be around.
(Ha ha no, it's not really the Muslims who are posting stuff like that; our Muslims are not Palestinian and mostly not even Arab. It's white people)
I think in the context of the conversation I was having, it was mostly regarding people saying that Israel was to blame for any and all violence Hamas may do. It's also worth noting that some of the people involved work at universities, where such sentiment is more common.
How many of those Jews offended by this terrible statement were fully onboard with the George Floyd riots? The party line was that those riots were the language of the unheard, a reaction to oppression, and a civil rights movement. How many George Floyd's have Israeli police or soldiers made in Gaza?
A person who supported BLM riots, who is progressive politically, but has found a sudden sympathy for using military action to reduce wanton violence by a marginalized minority?
You're singing my song. I've had to deal with this over, and over, and over, and over. It's tiresome. The most common incarnation is when they're not sure they can enjoy the work of this celebrity or that celebrity anymore because they did something that was insensitive to this group or that group.
You ask "how certain people can go through life with so little perspective that they feel so put upon by people with different viewpoints, yet cannot fathom that they may make others feel that way with their own, and that maybe they're wrong to do so." (I'm tired and so I'm using direct quotes.) The answer is that.. "it's just different". People who reason emotionally will use their emotions as a justification, and if you can get them to verbalize it, they'll say "it's just different."
All people see themselves as the center of their universe, but only a minority recognize that they do. If you see yourself as the center of the universe and have no cause to correct for that assumption, decisions of "right" and "wrong" will be based entirely on emotion, all the time. No meta level reasoning necessary, because it's not like your feelings can be wrong.
I'm not rational. But I admire rationalists. And that so many people flagrantly disregard the need to be less biased irritates me to no end.
If you see yourself as the center of the universe and have no cause to correct for that assumption, decisions of "right" and "wrong" will be based entirely on emotion, all the time. No meta level reasoning necessary, because it's not like your feelings can be wrong.
Not only that, but that person is also bombarded nearly non-stop with progressive messaging. Media, Universities, Federal Government, and social circles are all telling this person that they are 100% correct.
There’s a lot of wiggle room in “things that they don’t agree with”. The last week has had a lot of public statements that range from disagreements on strategy and ethics for a difficult ground war to questions related to the cycle of violence to ‘that live-streamed mass shooting was faked and if it wasn’t it was a political conspiracy‘ to literally complaining The Final Solution didn’t go far enough. The imprecision of the rest of your post does not really make clear what you’re engaged with.
There’s perhaps a steelman where even the most extreme sides of that spectrum did not have a even or honest application against the Red Tribe (both that Damore was not tolerated, and that the Blue Tribe equivalents to Alex Jones were), and I’d probably agree with you for a significant part of it. But outside of the irony of it all, I don’t really see how much info there is in people only noticing when their ox is on the line.
Because, from their perspective, they’re obviously right, and everyone else is obviously either evil or straight up insane. Yes, enough exposure to contrary evidence might change their minds. But they don’t have it.
Israeli Invasion Plans Target Gaza City and Hamas Leadership
From the New York Times’ report on the coming invasion (emphasis mine):
Tens of thousands of Hamas gunmen are thought to have entrenched themselves inside hundreds of miles of underground tunnels and bunkers beneath Gaza City and the surrounding parts of northern Gaza. Israeli military leaders expect that Hamas will attempt to impede their progress by blowing up some of those tunnels as Israelis advance above them, and by exploding roadside bombs and booby-trapping buildings.
Hamas also plans to ambush Israeli forces from behind by emerging suddenly from hidden tunnel openings dotted across northern Gaza, according to a Hamas officer who was not authorized to speak to the news media.
To make it easier for its soldiers to operate, the Israeli military’s rules of engagement have been loosened to allow soldiers to make fewer checks before shooting at suspected enemies, the three Israeli officers said, without giving further details.
The invasion was initially planned for the weekend, but was delayed by a few days at least in part because of weather conditions that would have made it harder for Israeli pilots and drone operators to provide ground forces with air cover, the officers said.
In addition to infantry, the Israeli strike force will include tanks, sappers and commandos, the officers added. The ground troops will be given cover by war planes, helicopter gunships, aerial drones and artillery fired from land and sea.
Hard not to see this turning into an unimaginable bloodbath. Tens of thousands of fighters? That tunnel guy’s YouTube video suggested they’d be extremely difficult to root out. I suppose all the hostages are living on borrowed time, if still alive. It promises to be a harsh look at the reality of modern urban warfare against a highly entrenched foe.
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of tunnel-gassing or some other tactic used to kill the people in them before going in. International treaties be damned. Screw going down into those things.
Israel probably doesn’t have the capacity to clear tunnels by chemical warfare, and won’t in time to help the invasion.
The reason is simple- quantity. Successful chemical warfare requires tons and tons and tons of the stuff, even in a confined space. Israel almost certainly doesn’t have that much, we’d know if they did because it’s sufficiently capital-intensive that you can’t hide it. And while it has a relatively short time frame to produce(after all, civilian chemical plants produce similar chemicals all the time), we’re still talking about months and months. And Israel wants to go in soon.
but israel/IDF had known for years if not decades about these tunnels. You are saying they have prepared for this sort of thing at all, even as an contingent solution?
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of tunnel-gassing or some other tactic used to kill the people in them before going in. International treaties be damned. Screw going down into those things.
Several times during WWII, the US Army was faced with similar situations involving well-fortified Japanese emplacements. In some of these instances, like Fort Drum in Manila, combat engineers pumped in thousands of gallons of mixed diesel fuel and gasoline, followed by a timed incendiary charge. I think the more modern solution typically involves thermobaric weapons. I'm not aware of any treaty since that would prohibit either, but both seem like painful ways to go out.
Yes, I would think something like this is better. If you use any type of poison gas, after you deploy it, you will eventually have to clean it out, make it safe, and check out what's in there. A major pain in the ass and high risk of friendly casualties if you don't do it perfectly. If you use flammables or explosives, then you know it's safe after the stuff goes boom and it has a little time to cool down.
Goes along with the argument I read somewhere else - poison gas isn't used anymore because it isn't a very good weapon, not because its effects are so horrible or it's banned by treaty. It was probably possible to ban by treaty because it's not a very good weapon more than being horrible.
A good rule of thumb is that if US signs some treaty about avoiding given type of weapons, it means it’s ineffective, but if it doesn’t, it is useful and practical. Compare, for example, chemical weapons, which US agreed to not use, with land mines or cluster munitions, which very much are a part of US arsenal, despite existence of treaties banning these: US is just not a signatory to these.
Even more cynically, the treaties that US is not a signatory to, simply are not worth much in the first place: the signatories to these simply don’t expect to fight a serious war that would require using these, so commitment to not use them is not worth much, because they will likely disregard their obligations soon as they do find themselves in one. See, for example, Ukraine, which happily uses these, despite being a signatory to Ottawa treaty.
Yep, if you light the chemicals on fire, it's perfect legal and it works even better. Not too many airtight doors will withstand a fuel-air explosion in the next compartment.
How much ordinance would it take to turn the entire Gaza strip into Verdun? I doubt that Israel has enough in its stockpile (unless we're counting the nukes), but it could theoretically be done.
My guess is that Israel will advance to the sea along a narrow front through the middle of the strip, cutting the insurgents fortified in Gaza City off from supplies and humanitarian aid being brought in from the South. How many weeks worth of provisions do you think Hamas has stocked up underground?
I did the math before out of curiosity to see how many 155mm shells it would take to cover all of the Gaza strip with the lethal radius of at least one shell's explosion. It came out to around 52 million shells. If all 250 of Israel's m109 howitzers fired at their sustained rate of fire of one round per minute (and assuming no need for maintenance etc) it would take them around 144 days. I was looking at this just to get some idea of the scales involved in all this.
Judging by satellite imagery, there's enough farmland south of Gaza that the front doesn't have to be that narrow. There are towns like Al-Mughraqa in the way, but they are similar enough to Donbass suburbs that IDF could hire some Wagner instructors or even point teams.
I'd still like to think Bibi is smarter than this, and that this is just bluffing. I recall him saying, years ago, that a key part of his strategy against Iran was them thinking "there's a crazy guy in Jerusalem willing to do anything".
Judge people by their actions. So far, Israel's tactic has been to starve, bomb and wear out the civilian population of Gaza. The endgame is clearly a massive ethnic cleansing. There are also rumors the US has offered Egypt monetary benefits to host at least a million Gazans in a "tent city". If I were Bibi, I'd act just like he has thus far. It's the smart, cost-effective strategy. Clearly, the status quo cannot continue and Israel is trying its level best to get rid of the Gaza civilian population. But doing so, even with the backing of the US, is harder than you might think given 24/7 media.
One last thing. One theme I've harped on is Bibi rhetorically boxing himself in. He has now set expectations very high that he may simply be forced to do things he knows are foolish because it would end his political career otherwise. I understand this sounds extraordinarily callous that a man in his position would be willing to sacrifice many lives to save his political skin, but I am no longer discounting any possibility.
Hand to heart, what do you think his odds of remaining in the upper echelons of Israeli politics are? He has failed catastrophically, but if he executes the «flawed but reliable tough-minded leader carrying us through the uncertain times of crisis» move well… I am not sure it'll work. But also, that's much of his expertise and genius.
Doesn't Bibi have that Berlusconi quality where you can get rubbished a dozen times but still bounce reliably back in time? Then again he's 73, but Berlusconi managed to hang on to some power almost to the end, too.
If you mean morally: What would you do if you stood to lose everything? Not just your life, not just your family, not just money, but the ultimate goal for which your entire life and your movement struggled? If decision makers far away, who don't care about you and won't listen to you if you talk to them, are about to make choices that will forever foreclose the dream that you have dedicated your life to making a reality? What wouldn't you do in the struggle for the most important thing in the world?
Saudi Arabia was about to normalize relations with Israel, Iran might have gotten a fresh Peace Deal and stopped funding for Palestinian militias. Those two events would have been the absolute death knell for the Palestinian cause, it's not clear where they go from there. The goal of this action in the medium term isn't to achieve a just peace, it is to prevent the creation of a permanent and unjust peace. The only tool Hamas had to reach decision makers in SA and Iran was the sympathy of their populations, to obtain that they needed the Israelis to commit atrocities. And not just the garden variety bulldozings and arrests that we've all grown unfortunately rather used to, something dreadful and spectacular. Which brings us to...
If you mean strategically: Israel is now doing exactly what Hamas intended for them to do. Don't be under the impression that Hamas' plan was for Israel to surrender, or that they expected Israel to take this lying down and just let Gaza alone. Hamas' leadership absolutely intended to have all of this happen. Their goal was for Israel to do exactly what Israel is now doing. They wanted Israel to launch a ground invasion of Gaza, and they don't care about civilian casualties on their own side. Hamas is preventing civilians from fleeing the fighting, they want civilians to suffer. This upcoming fight was their goal all along.
And now they have "tough-minded" Israelis and westerners patting themselves on the back about how smart they are for giving Hamas what they wanted. On this very forum, numerous posters argue that the invasion is the smart strategy, that only a fool wouldn't invade Gaza under these circumstances. The only way they were going to achieve such a blow that Israel would not merely fall into their intended trap, but rush into it, that Israelis would openly congratulate themselves for "finally meeting tit with tat."
Leaving the steelman aside, I don't know that any of that means this war is going to work out "well" for Hamas. The fortunes of war are always a gamble, and world public opinion is fickle and built on the actions of people far outside of Hamas' control. But it is meaningful that all actors are now dancing to Hamas' tune, doing what Hamas intended them to do. Consider this comment below from @Chrisprattalpharaptr in context. This is Israel's 9/11, and they are reacting as such, there is literally no one in the USA today who defends what we did after 9/11 as wise or well considered. I'm not sure the hijackers or their masters are better off for it, but the USA is certainly worse off. I suspect a similar outcome here: Hamas might not win, but Israel will certainly lose.
I am pro-Israeli here, but I can easily steelman this. Yes, what Hamas did was your cookie-cutter attempt at ethnic cleansing. You see, the way ethnic cleansing works is to do horrible shit to women, children and elderly and then proudly shout that from the rooftops. If you instill enough fear in the opposing ethnicity, they will vacate the premises on their own.
This is how it was done by Israelis themselves in 1948, they massacred the village of Deir Yassin and then run around literally broadcasting to rest of Arabs that they are next. By the way the extremist Israeli militia that participated in Deir Yassin massacre called Irgun was led by Menachim Begin, later a prime minister of Israel who called the massacre as "splendid act of conquest".
There are numerous other examples of successful ethnic cleansing. I can mentioned the Operation Storm during Balkan Wars in 1990s, where Croats ethnically cleansed Serbs from their territory with tacit approval of western coalition, the international tribunal even rubberstamped that it was actually not ethnic cleansing despite hundreds of thousands Serbs being effectively expelled. The formula was the same: run in, massacre anybody who refused to leave: mostly infirm, children, elderly etc. Then just enjoy wailing of their wives running before you, as they are just cheap but very authentic signal booster for those Serbs who did not get the message so far to run on the double. And now you have nice ethnically cleansed Croatia, part of EU and Eurozone, full of nice beaches and good food prepared by former soldiers that participated in the operation, with main perpetrator of the ethnic cleansing - general Ante Gotovina - considered as national hero.
Another successful ethnic cleansing is that of Germans after WW2, nobody now gives a shit about atrocities they experienced in East Prussia, currently Russian enclave or that they were expelled from Poland because Stalin literally moved Poland couple of hundreds kilometers to the west, which included German cities, or Czechoslovakia when Germans lived there for literally centuries. Nobody gives a shit about those Germans now, there is no wound on the soul of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles or Russians, this is the reality now and they will live happily ever after - until they themselves are ethnically cleansed sometimes in the future possibly.
As the last example I present the genocide of a tribe living on Catham Islands called Moriori. They had unique pacifist culture of nonviolence that was able to survive in isolation. That is until they got in contact with Māori people in 1835 - in paradox of history Māori themselves were the Moriori ancestors. Long story short, imagine slavery and genocide with the last descendand of the culture died in 1933, around 100 years after contact with Māori. Again, nobody gives a shit about Moriori, because there is now literally nobody to give a shit about, they are history complete with their unworkable pacifist culture. And Māori are now respected minority of New Zaeland complete with land rights recognition and all that.
And I think I will also close with another last example I ninjaedited here, that of ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh as it is very pertinent to the topic at hand. This instance of ethnic cleansing was made possible because the main ally of Armenians - Russia - is unable to provide any assistance, but also because Azerbaijan now has a very good geopolitical situation as being key for non-Russian supply of energy to Europe, having good diplomatic ties to Turkey as their protector as well as being on the upswing economically. There are some performative declarations from the west, but nothing will be done on practical level.
So I guess my "steelman" is that this is the reality of human nature, this is how the world worked and will work in the future. If there is anything that needs any "steelamaning", it is this first principles morality and dream of multicultural peace loving society where the whole world is full of Moriori peoples singing kumbaya together. The reality is much more ugly and the fact is that ethnic cleansing was used and will be used in the future as solution of various conflicts. In a sense I think that the Hamas attack was a success to large extent, it shows that the support is shifting away from Israel. Europe is still dependent on energy from Arab countries, Germans recently signed 15 years long contract for LNG from Qatar, and guess who is one of the largest supporter of Hamas globally. Who knows, maybe in due time we will have the same situation as with Nagorno-Karabakh, which was also a long war until it wasn't.
I've seen the Moriori mentioned dozens of times by right-wing New Zealanders going "Guess those Māori aren't so great after all, huh?", so I'd guess one would encounter such comments inside New Zealand way more.
Sure and I am using them as one of the examples now in this discussion, so we do give a shit in this sense. But it will not help Moriori people, so it is just discussion over spilled milk. Bygones are bygones, current ancestors of Māori people can just express some sympathy and move on fighting for the living nation instead of ruminating over the dead one.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
dr_analog 6mo ago
When your people have been oppressed by the enemy for 55 years they start to treat the yoke as normal, they forget what it means to be free. After all, it's not really an oppression when instead of soldiers bulldozing your farmhouse at night you get bureaucrats informing you your farmhouse violates the new safety zone requirements and has to be relocated. To remind them that they are people and not cattle you have to provoke the enemy into renewed brutality, and the only way to do it is by brutalizing the enemy.
When the plantation owner tells you, "I think we had an agreement about production quotas. It's the same on all plantations, so you can't say I am treating you unfairly. You have underdelivered, so I am forced to punish you, no hard feelings, right?" you don't organize a sit-in to renegotiate the number of lashes or the number of bales of cotton. You kill the enforcers and torch the mansion. Why would you also mutilate the sons, violate the wife and the daughters of the plantation owner in front of him before killing them? Do you really expect every other slaveowner to become so horrified by this that they release their slaves? No, they will become horrified by the atrocities and double down on the oppression, but that's your goal. The slaves have become too complacent. The indiscriminate punishments will remind them that the agreement they had with the owners was not an agreement at all.
Isn't it significantly different because the KKK is not an ethnic group? It's not even a village. There are no "civilian" KKK populations to blend in with, to get support from, to be hidden by.
Your country is perpetually blockaded by a neighboring country's government that doesn't want you to import anything without them first inspecting it. They cannot be persuaded by words alone to stop doing this. Therefore, you must attack them so hard that they beg for mercy.
(I'm sure there are other things Israel does to Gaza, but my understanding is that aside from imports, they do actually have sovereignty.)
They are a mostly peaceful group of activists who oppose the presence of black people in their community. They mostly hold marches which are mostly non-violent. They hide their faces for safety reasons.
Sometimes they burn crosses, sure, but you're the weird one for taking that as some kind of threat. After all, they're mostly peaceful. Only a small minority of Klan members are violent, and the ones who aren't violent.. well, they're not legally required to turn the ones who are violent in to the authorities, are they? You can't even prove they know anything about it! They could all be autonomous agents. The burden of proof is on you to prove there's coordination.
I wasn't actually asking you to steelman the KKK. I was pointing out that steelmanning is a bad thing to do here because that kind of steelmanning ignores the actual facts. It just isn't possible to honestly steelman Hamas or the KKK, any more than I could honestly steelman homeopathy or creationism.
They cannot be persuaded by words alone to stop doing this.
That's one of those things that's literally correct but misleading. They couldn't be persuaded by words, but they could be persuaded by Hamas stopping the rockets and terrorism, on top of some words.
This is precisely where rationality as an ethic fails.
There are lots of very good reasons to steal from, kill, maim, even genocide your fellow man. What stands in between us and horror cannot ever solely be reason.
Revenge at any cost needs no rationale, but supposing the leaders do have one:
There is no hope for the Palestinian cause so long as America is the hegemon. Therefore the only course of action is to maintain the cause alive until it falls. Therefore one must keep meeting the Israelis blow for blow and even provoke them to make sure they create enough despair in response that the movement stays alive until victory is possible.
People make too much hay of the colonial qualifier, but there is a significant parallel between the native american lost cause and this one. And it translates into similar tactics. For both sides.
People make too much hay of the colonial qualifier, but there is a significant parallel between the native american lost cause and this one. And it translates into similar tactics. For both sides.
?
As far as I'm aware Native resistance took the form typical of tribal warfare. It wasn't anything special except for the fact that they eventually found themselves completely outmatched in a way they hadn't when fighting comparable Indian tribes.
There's lots of parallels, from confinement to reservations, to raids on civilians and mutilation of their corpses, to more moderate forces being slowly eliminated by both sides, to the inherent tactics of guerilla and small independent parties leading coordinated raids using low tech means of insertion and communication. Even the ideological component and propaganda is somewhat similar.
If the Apache wars happened in a modern urban setting, they would look a lot like this.
There's lots of parallels, from confinement to reservations, to raids on civilians and mutilation of their corpses, to more moderate forces being slowly eliminated by both sides, to the inherent tactics of guerilla and small independent parties leading coordinated raids using low tech means of insertion and communication. Even the ideological component and propaganda is somewhat similar.
The raids on civilians, mutilation of corpses, guerilla tactics and small independent parties leading coordinated raids are just regular plains Indian tactics that date back to tactics used by the original steppe people over 5000 years ago. These aren't unique to their conflicts with settled peoples. They used these same tactics against each other. The only thing unique is that the settled people had the power to force them onto reservations instead of just scattering them or forcing them into a tributary relationship, like the Chinese, Persians and Romans regularly did in Eurasia.
Of course none of this is new or specific to that particular. This is just irregular warfare against a threat with an immense technology and ressource advantage.
Come to think of it, do we have examples of conflicts of that nature where the weaker belligerent actually won?
Come to think of it, do we have examples of conflicts of that nature where the weaker belligerent actually won?
Afghanistan, Vietnam... can't say for sure, but my impression is that most successful secessions resulted from a more advantaged power going "eh, it's not worth it", rather than the seceding one being able to withstand the full force of the who they're separating from.
Just to add to this — a recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia would be an incredibly significant step towards ending the Arab-Israeli conflict, and with it the hope of an independent Palestine. Consequently, a bloody offensive that keeps the flames of war alive and the Arab street enraged and derails the hope of a detente between Israel and KSA might arguably be judged worth it.
According to this article, Hamas has already partially succeeded in this endeavor.
After a bloody ground offensive with Palestinian deads in the tens of thousands, any Arab-Israel rapprochement will be probably off the table for at least a decade. And if Israel shows restraint, Hamas can blast that as a victory as well.
None of the major non-US powers required for WW3 (Russia, India, China) have great stakes in any of this. If Russia was losing in Ukraine, I'd be more worried.
The only power that cares is the US but none of its potential adversaries in the region (Lebanon, Iran) have nukes nor are any of remaining nuclear powers willing to use theirs to defend them. So a nothingburger. Sleep tight.
I think we can cross out Russia as able to do world war now. I guess using nukes maybe. But conventionally they are essentially Italy in WW2 at best now. A very minor front participant in conventional war.
Either Ukraine or Something involving China (be it Taiwan, or one of the ongoing territorial disputes with India, Japan, Vietnam, Et Al) both strike me as far more likely to "go global" than anything in the Middle East.
The Ukraine situation contained genuine possibilities of escalation to an European war (which still wouldn't necessarily be WW3) for about a month after it started. After that, most of the WW3 talk (in the West, at least) has not been particularly good-faith from either side - either pro-Ukrainian "This is already a WW3, the West doesn't realize it, why isn't it intervening now?" spiel or Western pro-Russian "Oh no, the nukes might start flying at any moment! The West must avoid this by dropping all support to Ukraine now!" spiel.
Negligible, unless retroactively incorporated into the story of WW3 just because it occurred around the same time.
There aren't any great powers on the side of Hamas, only Iran, and only partially. There are chances it could escalate to a war with Iran, but that would not be a world war.
The reality is: the next world war occurs either because China attacks Taiwan, or Russia invades a NATO country. The latter is... extremely unlikely.
The scenario where I can maybe see Putin being emboldened to do something like that is
Russia keeps gearing up more and more into a total war footing as the war drags on.
Ukraine's manpower gets ground down and western support doesn't keep pace with Russian escalation
Eventually the lines get broken and Russia storms through, capturing the western parts of Ukraine relatively quickly
High on victory and with a big war machine already running, Putin decides he can totally take the Baltics before America can really do anything about it and goes for it.
Agreed, likewise the inverse. Ukraine gains a decisive win on the southern front and decides that they're going to try and retake the Crimea. Russia nukes Kherson, Odessa, Melitopol, and Chaban to stave off a total collapse, and shit hits the fan.
Again, Likely scenario? No. But not totally implausible.
Very low. A world war necessarily involves at least 2 of the following: NATO, Russia, China.
I can see a path where Iran does something stupid and is promptly destroyed by the United States. But that would be where it ends. Russia already has its hands full and China doesn't seem interested in this kind of foreign adventure.
I don't think the US can "promptly" destroy Iran without nukes. And nukes make a world war very likely.
The most likely reason for Iran not becoming directly involved is geography. They can't invade without traversing the entire peninsula, and it's not like Syria and Jordan are so friendly with them they'd allow it or participate. They could presumably launch missiles, but conventional missiles don't decide a war, and they obviously invite direct retaliation.
Why? The nuke mythology --- nuclear winter this, radiation that, Fallout, "glassing", end of civilization, etc. --- creates a level of fear and hesitation in excess of what the effects of the weapons warrant. (I recall reading something about the nuclear winter concept being essentially made up for leftist political reasons in the 1980s.) If someone were to use a nuke in anger, this mythology would collapse. We'd come to understand that a nuclear warhead is merely a bomb that makes a bigger boom than other bombs and view 70 years of anti-nuke agitation as ignorant hysteria. With the "nuclear taboo" aside, why would a nuclear strike (especially a counter-force tactical nuke) cause a world war when a destructive conventional strike wouldn't?
The nuclear taboo is NOT aside. And if a nuke in the Middle East swept the taboo aside, Russia is freed to use its nuclear arsenal in Ukraine and then perhaps elsewhere... which again, brings you a lot closer to WWIII.
They wouldn't be able to "destroy" Iran without nukes, but conventional attacks would probably be enough to destroy whatever military capability they have to project power beyond their own borders, and the political situation within their own borders is dicey enough that it's a wild card; i.e. a rally around the flag effect could help the government, or getting entangled in a foreign war to help terrorists could be another addition to the list of grievances for last year's protestors.
From the nuclear nations which one will be willing to risk it's own existence as retaliation for Iran? Pakistan or North Korea probably? Pakistan could be bribed with Iran territory. China could be bribed with Iran's oil. Israel will be happy. Russia will gladly shrug for lesser sanctions and smaller aid in Ukraine. UK and France - meh. India - doubt it.
North Korea - who knows, but probably extremely low. The regime there is preoccupied with its own survival. Not with geopolitics at large. They seem to be happy to turn into an island.
Anyway - I think this is time to reconsider the battleship as a ship - just a delivery vehicle for dumb artillery and lots of it. That is protected by the carrier group.
Russia would be most likely, especially if lesser sanctions and smaller aid in Ukraine weren't forthcoming. Which I expect would be the case for a US arrogant enough to nuke Iran. Russia might take that as license to nuke Kyiv, for instance. But it's not going to happen; unless Iran goes nuclear themselves (which would mean they've successfully concealed completion of a nuclear weapons program), the US isn't going to nuke them. Nor Israel, unless a general Middle East war against them has already started with their backing, which also seems unlikely.
As for battleships, you can't win a war promptly with conventional artillery either. Eventually you'll have to invade. If you just keep shelling, we'll find out if Iran can figure a way to sink a carrier group.
If you just keep shelling, we'll find out if Iran can figure a way to sink a carrier group.
And if I remember correctly, wargame scenarios from the early 2000's (when the Navy was arguably in better shape) showed this exact scenario going very very badly for the US. So much so that they had to redo the wargame from scratch with heavy restrictions of the Red Team general to save face.
That's what it was, the "Millennium Challenge." On further review, the range limitations in the exercise were definitely a factor, but it's still not inspiring.
(However, be careful in reading these. Another source claims that the motorcycle messengers thing didn't happen and I have no way to research whether it's true.)
All pathways to WW3 seem to require Iran to get involved. So far, Iran has very much not got directly involved and there were some pretty high level controlled leaks from the Iranians that they were surprised by the scale of Hamas’ attack, even if the IRGC (as reported by WSJ) may have approved some form of aggression. Iran’s relations with Hamas are more frayed than they are with Hezbollah or the Houthis; Hamas is Sunni and they were initially on opposite sides of the Syrian Civil War.
Iran lacks the ability to easily project force to Israel. While troops could march (and they’d have to go overland) through Iraq and Syria to get to Israel they would be vulnerable doing so, supply lines would be stretched, and it would annoy the Iraqi Shia militias currently making huge oil profits from Iraq’s relative state of calm. Iran has medium range missiles capable of hitting Israel, but how many they have is unknown. Israel’s options for physical retaliation would be slim, but in many ways that reduces the risk that Iran acts overly aggressive out of fear.
Iran is in a good place in the region now, and that’s especially true as long as Iraq remains peaceful and largely ruled by Shia groups allied with Iran, and as long as Assad is in power in Syria. Shuffling the deck of cards isn’t in their interest. If Hezbollah decides enough is enough and goes in the Iranians will have to make a difficult decision, but even there i think direct engagement is very, very far from guaranteed. If Hezbollah is destroyed or severely damaged, the Iranian position remains quite strong.
Iran has medium range missiles capable of hitting Israel, but how many they have is unknown. Israel’s options for physical retaliation would be slim, but in many ways that reduces the risk that Iran acts overly aggressive out of fear.
Supposing that Iran did launch missals, would Israel be able to distinguish between conventional missals and WMDs (be they chemical and nuclear)?
And given that they wouldn't know the content of the missals launched by Iran, Israel would have to assume that they might be WMDs. By this I mean to say that a rockets from Iran to Israel might have the same problem as rockets launched from Russia to the USA, it would risk nuclear escalation given that you cannot determine the content of the missals, and given that there is a possibility that the missals are in fact a nuclear first strike.
Given the risk of escalation it it would seem unlikely that Iran proper directly attacks Israel.
You are assuming that the only way the war might propagate to Iran is if Iran decides to. But Israel could very well decide that for them. Iran has been weakened by recent anti regime protests and Israel's government needs to prove they do something about the security of their citizen without hurting Hamas too much because Hamas has hostages. It's not the most plausible issue, but game-theoretically hurting Iran is somewhat sound, just like nuking Belarus as a retaliation against Russia (see The Bomb by Fred Kaplan)
I imagine the US told Israel and Iran “we are putting two carrier groups close to Israel. Israel will not attack Iran. If Iran does anything the carrier groups will attack Iran.”
Really decreases the odds either party “starts” something.
Too far away. I looked it up for a previous comment on this thread.
Basically the published combat range of the aircraft in their inventory just barely reaches the closest border of Iran over the most direct possible route. Any worthwhile targets are even further. And those routes go over Jordan and Iraq, both of which are not particularly friendly to Israel. Any attempts to avoid them or fly evasive routes to be less visible to their air defense just makes the range problem even worse. The Israeli air force does have some tanker aircraft in inventory, but one or more midair refuelings in hostile airspace sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Missiles may be possible, but missiles without nukes just aren't very destructive and may not be worth the bother. A conventionally-armed missile is a strange enough thing to do that it's probably reasonable for any country to assume any medium range ballistic missile is nuclear and respond accordingly.
Israel might start with Hezbollah. It's a more realistic target than Iran, and it would be more explanable to the population (we can't get rid of the Hamas because hostages but we will get rid of hezbollah). I don't really believe it will happen, it's just something possible
Unclear in what quantities. At least for Israel analysts seem to think the number of medium range non-nuclear missiles capable of hitting Tehran is very modest.
If Israel drags both Sunni and Shia powers into the war, things will be unfortunate, but there will not be a united front for very long. I would expect that regional tensions between Iran and KSA will actually decrease temporarily, then the united front will fracture over time as the desires of the governments diverge from that of their populace and trust disintegrates.
I think we're less likely to see this war lead to the destruction of Israel, or WWIII, than we are to see it lead to further disintegration of MENA governments when they refuse to invade Israel as their populace demands.
The most likely path to this resulting in WW3 is several other actors deciding that now is the time for military adventurism because of America's finite response capacity.
When I created this megathread, here is what I posted to the moderator Discord:
A couple users asked for an Israel-Gaza megathread, it's maybe a bit late for that but maybe not so I went ahead and gave them one. I optimistically did not name it "World War III Opens on a Second Front."
My understanding of military decisions is exclusively historical and political, so I can't speak to the nuts and bolts of this, but every conflict like the ones in Ukraine and Israel opens the door a little wider for attacks of opportunity elsewhere. I am skeptical that China will ever invade Taiwan--the economic benefits of just rattling sabers at them for all of eternity seem far better than the ideological benefits of burning the island to cinders. I sometimes wonder if Taiwan is allowed to be what it is because someone in China read Brave New World and decided that an island of malcontent exiles was a pretty good idea, actually.
But their ability to get away with an invasion of Taiwan is certainly increased by contemporaneous conflict elsewhere.
Other contenders for the "next front in World War III" presumably include Iran and North Korea, ye olde Axis of Evil, but there are plenty of other places that could qualify. The flood of migrants arriving in Europe and the United States every day may be driven primarily by economics, but one of the worst things for any economy is armed conflict, and it is at some level armed conflict that almost all such migrants are ultimately fleeing. How much of the world needs be at war, to call it a World War?
Vox Day had some discussion on his site around the possibility of this spilling out into WW3. Basically it was through considering Ukraine/Russia, Iran/Israel and China/Taiwan as separate fronts. China and Russia both gain from flashpoints such as what is happening in Israel, as it draws focus and resources away from their spheres.
A world war is when the war is global. Even 10 local conflicts don't make a world war until there are two sides and japan allies with germany even though they are not fighting on the same continent. And by that, I mean that they declare war and peace together, not that they are allies in that they help each other somehow.
How much of the world needs be at war, to call it a World War?
When white and honorary white start to die in sufficient quantities.
You also missed the Nagorno Karabakh in "list of things that hit the fan recently" that I think is also result of embolden adversaries and weakened russia.
I always thought of the current axis of evil as laughable. All the countries there are pathetic and china wants not a part of it.
The Armenia thing is interesting. It’s one thing ethnically cleansing 30,000 Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, quite another occupying a hostile nationalist population a third the size of your own with a different religion and 2000 year history.
A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray. Turkey is very worrying wild card and they will have zero resistance if they invade bulgaria and greece. Which have nothing to stop them with. And Ergodan has some ottoman restoration dreams. They may not even have to revoke the NATO membership to make things even more confusing. And they have couple of million of refugees that they can draft.
So right now western powers have choice - protect what is left of Bulgaria - mostly Sofia, northern parts above the Balkan mountains. Protect serbia or protect Vienna. Throw the mess in Ukraine. Assume that suddenly all those muslims we already accepted suddenly decide to cause trouble - no matter if provoked or not. So you will soon have a lot of crises. And you are just one or two in asia to have world war. Thank got that latin america is peaceful at least (in not a keg of powder sense)
Assad is still cleaning up a civil war and attempting reconstruction. Egypt under Sisi certainly isn’t going to get involved in defense of Hamas / the Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan isn’t either after their own history with the Palestinians.
So a “whole middle eastern war” against Israel involves who - maybe Hezbollah, Hamas and some Iranian support (probably not boots on the ground, though)? Maybe Iraqi Shia militias, although they don’t want a war now they’re in power there? the Gulf Arabs don’t want a victorious Iran turning its attention toward the holy cities and the gulf.
It’s all possible, of course, but is it likely? I don’t know.
Jordan isn’t either after their own history with the Palestinians.
Indeed; the West Bank Palestinians are more or less a poison pill preventing Jordan from invading, even if Jordan would otherwise want to. Same on for Gaza Palestinians and Egypt.
How is turkey going to succeed against greece and bulgaria where russia failed against ukraine, when they will get much more support, and presumably want to become turks even less than ukrainians want to become russians? Turkey’s military budget is 11 B (source) and greece 8 B, bulgaria 1B (This is a clue that bulgaria, contrary to greece, doesn’t think turkey is a threat to it). Given the budget ratio was 10-to-1 against ukraine, I will put turkey’s chances of conquering bulgaria and greece at approximately 0.
A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray.
Why would it mean that though? There have already been at least 3 wars (48, 67, 73) involving full-scale armies from multiple Arab nations attacking Israel, and they haven't fallen yet.
On paper, the Arab nations would appear to have ample forces to do the job. But historically, they've had trouble actually coordinating and committing to attacks. I see no reason to presume that that has changed. Syria and Egypt seem to have enough internal problems these days that it's hard to see them pulling off a large-scale offensive action.
Please describe other types of wide middle eastern war?
Don't forget that the previous wars were waged against secular governments. I don't know the current state of pan arabism but I think that it is ripe for one to try and get the reigns.
I don't understand? You asserted that "A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray". Exactly what war are you picturing that would plausibly lead to Israel falling without direct intervention? I mentioned several actual wars that happened. Multiple times, the nations surrounding Israel united to attack them, and each time, Israel did not fall. A number of other wars have also happened in the Middle East, none of which involved Israel at all or led to them falling.
I actually can't think of any war in the modern era in which any of the Arab nations displayed impressive offensive capability, as in assembling a large force and sending it outside their borders to capture foreign territory held by determined adversaries. Usually they only attack each other, and mostly bog down pretty quickly unless the region they're attacking basically gives up to them. They tend to smash their faces into a brick wall every time they try to attack territory held by Westernized forces.
Whether you or I think that the area is "ripe" for a united pan-Arab movement now, the fact is that it's been tried a bunch of times over the last century and failed every time. I don't see any reason to expect anything to be different now.
Turkey isn’t going to war with Greece any time soon. The country’s membership of NATO is central to all of its defense plans and pretty important to its national identity. Entirely possible it gets drawn into the next round of Armenia-Azerbaijan though.
Probably true 15 years ago. Erdogan has played with both turkish nationalism and islamism. I wouldn't be so optimistic. The west didn't accept Turkey as equal, I am not sure at least in the mind of the elite they want to be accepted any more.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
Stefferi 6mo ago
Agree, but the likelihood is now higher than it was previously. If a set of global conflicts emerge with even loosely defined lines, I would expect it to be a product in no small part of opportunism in the face of the United States being spread too thin to be a reliable partner in stopping something like an attack on Taiwan. I don't really know how to put a meaningful percentage guess on the likelihood, but the combination of resources and materiel drained into Ukraine and naval assets being deployed to assist Israel commits the American military to a greater extent than is typical.
It seems like everyone always leaves out the possibility that China just... takes Taiwan. Like if the US does get spread pretty thin and China takes the opportunity, that doesn't automatically mean WWIII happens. Frankly, the thinner the US gets spread, the lower the odds of Taiwan being sufficient to trigger the war.
If the US is totally dominant, then China will wait and so no war occurs. If the US is severely weakened, then China will simply take Taiwan with minimal US intervention, and no world war occurs. It's only in some weird middle ground, where China perceives the US as spread too thin but the US still commits to defending Taiwan, that there's any risk of something major.
Of course, I've never been the worrying sort, and I'm not as opposed to war as the average person, so maybe I'm just underestimating the odds.
We've already seen the tendency of autocratic regimes to overestimate their own military capabilities in the current Ukraine-Russia war. And islands are notoriously easy to defend/hard to attack. If China just marches in and takes over, you're right. If China miscalculates, the first landing fails and the war turns into a longer slog/siege, the western public will most likely want to support Taiwan, similar to how it went with the Ukraine. Which may not guarantee WW3, but it adds another roll of the dice, and destabilizes the world further.
to support Taiwan, similar to how it went with the Ukraine
I agree with your overall point entirely, but this gets me thinking: would the western public have supported Ukraine if the US military/intelligence community didn't make sure that happened?
Most people's position on the war doesn't seem to be rooted in serious principles, and I have no doubt that if the regime pulled a Eurasia/Eastasia flip tomorrow, most of the public would follow.
We've been having an "honest" conversation about Zionism in the West for a long time
I don't think so. Keith's perspective is missing and most of the anti-Zionism in the West is typically very leftist. I think folks like Keith Woods bring the perspective that Zionism is responsible for instability and unrest in the Middle-East and thus brings floods of refugees to Europe. Jewish Zionists living in the West then shame White people to take them into our countries - even as they support ethno-nationalism for themselves. So nationalism when in Israel but liberalism in the diaspora. So far, I agree with Keith's analysis.
Where I differ with Kieth is that I think this is actually the common norm among most ethnic minorities. He makes it sound like Jews are outliers. I've often talked about Turks living in Germany, NL, France etc but there are many other examples.The main difference is not behavior per se but power. The Jewish diaspora is infinitely more powerful and influential than whatever little crumbs that Turks, Kurds, Armenians or any other Middle-Eastern group get off the table, despite often being far more numerous than Jews - at least in Europe.
In other words, it's White people who are abnormally non-tribal rather than Jews being unusually tribal. Jewish tribalism makes much more political and social impact because of relative power differentials favouring Jews compared to other ethnic minorities who are much less influential. But that doesn't mean those other minorities' fundamental patterns of behaviour are any different.
I don't think so. Keith's perspective is missing and most of the anti-Zionism in the West is typically very leftist.
Anti-Zionism is (in the US, at least), profoundly anti-establishment. The anti-establishment right didn't have a megaphone until Trump walked down the escalator in 2016, and this is the first time since then that Israel-Palestine has been the current thing. But "why can Israel oppose immigration but the US can't" and "why can Israel play to win with the Palestinians when the US has its hands tied in Iraq" where both fairly common memes on the anti-establishment right back in the noughties. (Practically every commentator on the Unz review plus Moldbug)
Unlike the anti-establishment left, the anti-establishment right isn't consistently anti-Zionist, because it includes rabid Islamophobes who support Israel on enemy-of-my-enemy grounds, and wackjob Christians who support Israel in order to immanentize the escheaton. But the natural position of the anti-establishment right is that Israel is just another country and the US should not spend money defending them for the same reasons as Ukraine.
The left may not be consistently anti-Israel, but even when not actually anti-Israel, it's anti-a lot of things Israel does, including border walls. So the answer is "pretty much nobody who opposes limits on immigration in the US supports it for Israel".
I think folks like Keith Woods bring the perspective that Zionism is responsible for instability and unrest in the Middle-East and thus brings floods of refugees to Europe.
How many of the refugees currently in Europe are due to instabilities precisely provoked by Israel, though?
The biggest refugee movements to Europe in the past decade, if I've understood correctly, can be connected to the destabilization and war in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. In case of Iraq, there's a direct argument to be made that Israel lobbied America to invade, though this was hardly the only factor leading to Bush admin to make this move.
However, in case of Syria, my understanding is that the primarly supporters of the anti-Assad rising that then became a civil war was not Israel - which of course hated Assad but didn't evince a particular wish for the opposition to take over either - but the Gulf States and, later, Turkey. One could argue that Israel preferred a destabilized, riven Syria to either party winning, but even then you'd have to make an actual argument as to how, exactly, Israel played its cards to make that happen, rather that a long civil war is simply what happens when you have two armies of roughly equal strength and also foreign countries (Turkey, Russia) willing to directly intervene to save their preferred side's bacon.
Insofar as Libya goes, my understanding is that Gaddafi had recently tried to make amends with Israel, and I don't think I've seen anyone in particular blame Israel for the Libyan Revolution (and its failure), and US war in Afghanistan - again, if my understanding is correct - was considered by Israelis a sideshow, a distraction from the more important cause of invading Iraq and Iran. Furthermore, IIRC even in case of Iraq, the initial refugee waves of the war in 2003 and the following breakdown of order went to the neighboring countries, and only the 2015 refugee wave triggered by breakdown of Syria and Libya led to a wider Iraqi movement to Europe.
Of course, if one thinks that there's literally nothing in the world that happens without the Jewish/Israeli hidden hand at play it's natural to blame Israel for all of these, but I'd really need to see a more comprehensive argument for major Israeli involvement in most of these cases.
That's obviously a big issue as well (even moreso), I just wanted to comment on whether you can say that Zionism in even the narrow sense (ie. support for actual country of Israel, or the actual country of Israel's actions abroad) can be blamed on the conflicts leading to the refugee crisis in this way.
I think there’s a more innocuous way that this helps the dissident right, which doesn’t involve summoning the specter of anti-semitism. It’s as simple as: “look at this people proud of their bloodline, who make their ancestry the focus of their relationship with God Himself, who never dwell on any historical guilt on their part (such an idea is anathema), who impugn the whole world’s history with the guilt of hating them without cause, who have legislated in Israel to keep a portion of their bloodline pure forever, who deny the atrocities they committed in the founding of their Lebensraum (PDF warning / bottom of pg 83) (so boldly in fact that they accuse the victims of atrocities in the same breath), whose lawmakers call for ethnic cleansing without blemish to their reputation.”
Rather than leading to a hatred of Zionist Jews, this would lead to a love and admiration of them as an exemplar of behavior for Western conservatives.
It can be both. Sometime, a white racist says that black people are racists too, and it means two things: (1) they are racists, because there is no such thing as human rights, equality or whatever, everyone just fights for his own people; (2) they are racists, so it's better for us to be racist against them, because they are dangerous to us. Those two claims are complementary. But there are still holes in that theory, the first one beeing how you establish the boundaries between your people and the rest of the world, and the second one that the existence of bad people is no argument against morality.
There are several related but distinct reasons why opponents of progressivism may think the war in Israel can help with the ongoing vibe-shift.
(1) Discrediting fringe leftists. Cheering on murder of babies and rapes etc. is a very bad look, and the videos we got out of Israel are way more disturbing and graphic than most content that will have come to normies' attention in a long while. A loss of status for fringe leftists will shift power back to normies and centrists within their respective left-wing parties/organisations/ecosystems who are easier for everyone else to deal with.
(2) Enshrining speech norms. Classic "I never thought leopards would bite my face" stuff. Inevitably there will be some overreactions involved in (1) and there will doubtless be some people who get fired/censured/book deals cancelled etc. for fairly milquetoast anti-Israeli rhetoric. This provides more common ground for progressives and everyone else when determining speech norms. This doesn't mean the scales will drop from progressives’ eyes and they'll decide free speech is good actually, but it's far more likely two sides will come to a compromise peace when the casualties are high on both sides rather than just one.
(3) Deepening anti-Muslim immigration sentiment. The scenes that really seem to be serving to epater les normies so far are the images of angry mostly middle eastern men everywhere from London to Paris to Sydney to even small towns like Brighton shouting extreme slogans, wearing somewhat unsettling garb (balaclavas, veils, lots of black), and generally demonstrating their alienness to their host cultures. This will contribute, I suspect, to the ongoing realisation among Europeans that not all immigrant groups are equal and muslim immigrants in particular bring a host of problems. It might be another decade until Europeans really start responding (and by then it might be too late) but this might hasten the realisation.
(4) Breaking Jewish support for the left. This is a much more patchy and country-specific phenomenon, but needless to say, Jewish citizens in Western countries tend to be wealthier, more educated, and more influential than the median citizen. To the extent that the current shitshow from the left manages to alienate them such that they plough their resources behind centrists and other non-progressives, so much the better.
It's pretty hypocritical because antisemitism is a major driver of Zionism. When Jews have to flee, they go to Israel. Obviously those antisemits don't care about Palestine (when have they be interested about dead arabs anyway?)
Everyone on the right agrees that the establishment is anti-white now, but that it's tactically more acceptable to criticize them for being anti-Semitic.
Regular conservatives are being smart, understand that whenever you can hurt BLM and campus radicals, it's generally a good thing. Anti-whiteness and anti-Semitism and socialism all come from the same source, philosophy of losers.
Anti-semites on the right though prioritize their dislike of Jews, so sit around sulking, even take the Palestinian side.
Sulking is bad and doesn't get you anywhere. Calling out anti-white discrimination on the right has never been more acceptable, so things are moving in the right direction. But it'll have to ride the coattails of philo-Semitism. This is just reality.
According to this argument, this will «open people's eyes to "Jewsish power" in the West» in the sense that it'll teach right-wingers to directly appeal to it, to legitimize their own, by default low-status and illegitimate, political demands. The great mass of whites can be pissed upon by progressives for decades; but if you bludgeon them over the head with their documented support of genocidally anti-Semitic Muslims, suddenly there's a chink in their armor and you can have their policies rolled back.
From normie liberals to leftists describing settler activity as "pogroms", Jews have been vocal opponents of both Zionism and Israel for over one hundred years.
Israeli settlers and soldiers have killed 51 Palestinians in the West Bank this past week, with two villages entirely depopulated after attacks.
Out of curiosity, how would you describe this particular kind of settler activity and why does «pogroms» not apply? In Russian, погром means simply «trashing» or «smashing» or perhaps «wrecking» a community.
Everyone on the right agrees that the establishment is anti-white now, but that it's tactically more acceptable to criticize them for being anti-Semitic.... Anti-whiteness and anti-Semitism and socialism all come from the same source
It's very strange premise by Hanania.... the establishment is anti-white and philo-semitic. And for that matter, the anti-white consensus in the establishment rode the coattails of philo-semitism, so it's far more plausible to say the anti-white consensus and philo-semitism came from the same source than the ahistorical claim that anti-Semitism and anti-White ideology both come from socialism.
ahistorical claim that anti-Semitism and anti-White ideology both come from socialism.
I don't think that's what he's really saying there. The point I believed he was making was that socialism, anti-semitism and anti-whiteness all spring from people who are losers, not because there's a big connection between the three ideas but because extremists of any political stripe tend to be losers who overcompensate for their failures by embracing political causes in a way that tends towards the extreme.
That said I think his post is wrong anyway, so please don't take this as me defending him.
Usually (fellow Cyrillic user here) pogroms in the west are understood as - when the rest of the village gathers their pitchforks and deals nasty stuff to the minority. It doesn't include formal direct use of state power.
I understood them to only involve state power indirectly - a pogrom may be directly the action of independent individuals, but is only really possible if the proper state powers ignore them.
the April 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which 49 Jews were killed, 92 were gravely injured, and more than 500 suffered other injuries, including the destruction of more than 1,500 homes.
Or in other words, Jews were being scapegoated for economic downturns. In the town itself, there's evidence that public officials also cooperated with the rioters, enabling this tragedy.
I agree that pogroms are supposed to be bottom-up, but they largely are even in this case – the settlers have long been raring to go, and Israel as an ethnonationalist country naturally complies with the people's wishes more than could be expected in the Russian Empire.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
jewdefender 6mo ago·Edited 6mo ago
Keith Woods actually catches a lot of flak within the dissident right for being genuinely pro-Palestinian, he's maintained that position for years now. Most of the DR is anti-Zionist and ambivalent towards the Palestinians at best, Keith is an exception who identifies with the Palestinian struggle.
Contrary to Woods, anti-Zionism has been fashionable among the intelligentisa for many decades, and since its inception, Israel has been the object of international scorn.
...
We've been having an "honest" conversation about Zionism in the West for a long time. People like Keith Woods are just upset it hasn't been as explicitly antisemitic as they would like.
The anti-Zionism you are describing, which certainly exists, has existed within a fundamentally different strain of ideas than what could be considered anti-Semitism in the European tradition. That anti-Zionism is downstream from Marxist, anti-Colonial, anti-apartheid interpretations of history and influence on academia. There has been much debate over the line where the anti-Zionist stance begins to borrow influence from more traditional anti-Semitism, but there's been a very clear delineation for the most part.
While there has been more or less a handle on traditional European anti-Semitism in public consciousness and the public square, the quasi-Marxist anti-Zionism has been much more difficult to suppress. This means, in practice, while there is much protest over Jewish colonialism it is still taboo to talk about Jewish influence in American political or cultural life in any critical measure. I think what the DR hopes for is for this crisis to begin to bridge the gap between the two in the public discourse. The power, hypocrisy, and bloodlust coming to a head opens up the conversation to much more than just debates about colonialism.
You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for cancelled Muslims.
You come here, learn the way to sound sophisticated is to be a person of color speaking out against a white oppressor.
You naturally apply the standard framework to Israel-Palestine, but suddenly find yourself unemployable.
Which received an emoji reply from Elon Musk is an example of the Israeli-Palestinian question expanding from its anti-colonial walled garden to tougher questions that have not been featured on college campuses or in school curriculum.
Carlson's critique is fundamentally different from the left-wing anti-Zionism you are talking about.
I’d say Carlson’s criticism is more the traditional libertarian argument against overseas entanglements. Like the Marxist anticolonialist argument this occasionally borrows from ‘traditional antisemitism’ but isn’t really the same thing. Zionism and Israel aren’t really relevant to traditional antisemitism and unless there’s a big conflagration in Israel nobody on the more staunchly antisemitic side of the dissident right really cares about Israel. The only use for it is as a cudgel in accusations of hypocrisy. In Ben’s case though, while he isn’t sympathetic to wignatism, his position on illegal immigration at the southern border (and in general) is no more generous than that of such gentile figures as Trump or DeSantis, has criticized the legal immigration system for “favoring third world immigrants” and has argued that limiting legal immigration on grounds of culture and projected welfare usage are both acceptable to him. That puts him on the hard right of GOP in the US - as Hanania noted this week - and so painting him as a ‘traitor’ or whatever is kind of ridiculous when his position on immigration isn’t different to the average Fox host’s and isn’t even oceans away from Carlson’s.
In truth the DR doesn’t really want to accept that the number of hardcore Jennifer Rubin “mass immigration for thee but not for me” types (and even Rubin considers Israeli colonization of the West Bank a “racist” project that she opposes, and has spent more of the last week criticizing Netanyahu contra Biden than anything else) are actually pretty rare. Most hardcore Zionists are in Israel and don’t care about American domestic policy at all, while many hardcore pro-immigration blue haired Jewish college activists consider Israel a racist apartheid state. In between there is some hypocrisy, but I think the fair callout is that the DR:
a) Doesn’t actually care about Israel going full ethnonationalist, and with few exceptions has little or no sympathy with Palestinians
b) Would hate the views of the HIAS-type immigration activists and leftists just as much even if (and even when) they completely disavowed Israel and Zionism (and therefore could not be accused of any hypocrisy on this issue).
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
2rafa 6mo ago·Edited 6mo ago
I’d say Carlson’s criticism is more the traditional libertarian argument against overseas entanglements.
There was also a latent anti-Semitism in the libertarian anti-interventionist movement represented by those like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul. The association of "Neocons" with Zionists in the American policy apparatus was fairly ubiquitous there, and complaint about Zionist influence in American foreign policy is certainly an echo of traditional European anti-Semitism and distinct from the anti-Colonial arguments.
In Ben’s case though, while he isn’t sympathetic to wignatism, his position on illegal immigration at the southern border (and in general) is no more generous than that of such gentile figures as Trump or DeSantis, has criticized the legal immigration system for “favoring third world immigrants” and has argued that limiting legal immigration on grounds of culture and projected welfare usage are both acceptable to him. That puts him on the hard right of GOP in the US
Ben Shapiro famously tweeted that "And by the way, I don't give a damn about the so-called 'browning of America.' Color doesn't matter. Ideology does." But of course, when it comes to Israel he massively cares about demographics, although he can hide behind the unique fact that membership to his "ideology" is genetically inherited.
I don't necessarily disagree that Ben Shapiro represents the "most right" you can go on that issue in the mainstream, but that's kind of the point. It demonstrates the gatekeeping. You can oppose immigration up until you start presenting arguments motivated by a white identity and character, or advocating for the interests of white people. People like Ben Shapiro have been absolutely essential in keeping those gates, so him representing the "maximum kosher" anti-immigration posture would be evidence for the DR argument instead of against it. If Ben Shapiro acknowledged the validity of white identarian arguments against demographic change you would have a point, but he does not do so. Shapiro's ethnic fanaticism is also represented by his recent rant against the West for "latent Jew hatred." So he doesn't care about the browning of the West, but he really does care about the latent Jew hatred of the West, despite how the West has bent over backwards to accommodate the Jews in the past several decades. It's par for the course.
In truth the DR doesn’t really want to accept that the number of hardcore Jennifer Rubin “mass immigration for thee but not for me” types (and even Rubin considers Israeli colonization of the West Bank a “racist” project that she opposes, and has spent more of the last week criticizing Netanyahu contra Biden than anything else) are actually pretty rare.
The DR's position doesn't rely on the number of Jennifer Rubins, it relies on an analysis of the broader popular culture and academic consensus which pathologizes white identity and sacralizes Jewish identity. The number of people who pathologize white identity and worship Jewish identity is very high among both Jews and whites.
I don't see very many DR people pretending to care about the Palestinians per se (there are some, sure). Israel absolutely matters here because it exposes this consensus as being a farce, it's just an exercise in Jewish power rather than a morally consistent framework derived from truthful moral enlightenment.
Ben Shapiro famously tweeted that "And by the way, I don't give a damn about the so-called 'browning of America.' Color doesn't matter. Ideology does." But of course, when it comes to Israel he massively cares about demographics, although he can hide behind the unique fact that membership to his "ideology" is genetically inherited.
It can be very easily argued that ben Shapiro’s problem with hamas is ideological. He often mentions that there is a large amount of Palestinians living in Israel. I haven’t heard him say they need to be removed.
And I think it can be very easily argued that people like Shapiro are afforded quite a bit more charity than other people. Transfer is not a dirty word, Ben'2003:
Half measures merely postpone our realization that the Arabs dream of Israel's destruction. Without drastic measures, the Arab dream will come true. In the short term, the establishment of a "Palestinian state" based in Judea, Samaria and Gaza cuts Israel to the bone. In some places, Israel would be an unthinkable 9 miles wide. In the long term, the growth of the hostile Israeli-Arab population within pre-1967 Israel bodes ill for the future of the Jewish state. As University of Haifa professor Arnon Soffer says, "The trends and indicators all point to an economic and ecological catastrophe waiting to happen and of the death knell of the ideological dream of a Jewish state."
Here is the bottom line: If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It's an ugly solution, but it is the only solution. And it is far less ugly than the prospect of bloody conflict ad infinitum. When two populations are constantly enmeshed in conflict, it is insane to suggest that somehow deep-seated ideological change will miraculously occur, allowing the two sides to live together.
Unfortunately, this insanity is generally accepted as "the only way forward." President Bush accepts it because it is politically palatable. The Arabs accept it because for them, it is a Trojan horse. The Israelis accept it because they are afraid that if they expel the Arabs, they will be called Nazis.
For anyone who lived through the Holocaust, or who has relatives who died in it, being called a Nazi is unspeakably terrible. That is the secret weapon of the Arabs. Any time the Jews get wise and threaten mass expulsion of Arabs, the Arabs pull out their big stick, equating Nazism with Zionism. Their cartoons merge swastikas with stars of David. Their newspapers call Ariel Sharon another Adolf Hitler. Their spokespeople cry "Genocide!" And the Jews cower in fear that they could be equated with their parents' murderers.
The Jews don't realize that expelling a hostile population is a commonly used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements. There are no gas chambers here. It's not genocide; it's transfer. It's not Hitler; it's Churchill.
[…] Arab-Jewish conflict is exponentially more volatile than German-Polish conflict ever was. And the solution is far easier. If there was "room in Germany for the German populations of East Prussia and of the other territories," as Churchill stated, there is certainly room in the spacious Muslim states of the Middle East for 5 million Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. If Germans, who had a centuries-old connection to the newly created Polish territory, could be expelled, then surely Palestinians, whose claim to Judea, Samaria and Gaza is dubious at best, can be expelled.
It's time to stop being squeamish. Jews are not Nazis. Transfer is not genocide. And anything else isn't a solution.
Now, granted, he was 19 at the time. Perhaps he has mellowed out, realized there are still softer ways to solve conflicts… As did Hanania.
Incidentally, like a third of Israeli population is younger than 18.
On the object level, I even agree with him that population exchanges and land swaps work. As does overwhelming power.
That idea was stupid and immoral. I have myself called that idea “inhumane and impractical,” as well as a “moral and philosophical error.” It is also worth noting that the same people who decried the transfer column as genocidal and ethnic cleansing were very much in favor of forcing every single Jew out of the Gaza Strip in 2006, and seem fine with complete destruction of Israeli settlements in favor of a Judenrein Palestinian state.
"inhumane and impractical":
Some on the right have proposed population transfer from the Gaza Strip or West Bank as a solution. This is both inhumane and impractical. Moving millions of Palestinians out of areas they have known for their entire lives will certainly not pave the way to peace. Moreover, these Palestinians will have no place to go, since their brethren across the Arab would prefer to keep them cooped up in dismal poverty than house them in their own lands.
In the end, both right and left agree that a population separation is necessary. That does not mean Palestinian statehood, which will undoubtedly result in another Iran directly on Israel's borders. It means instead moving beyond utopianism and making mental peace with the fact that no solution will be permanent. Israel will have to protect its citizens, and it will have to continue to police Palestinian borders. Settlements are not the problem here. Removing settlements is not the solution. The problem is intractable.
Ben really is very good at kvetching and handwringing. Every time I notice such an amusing character and see how much attention and respect American conservative gentiles afford him, I also remember my more hot-headed sentiments about… well, we all can grow up to some extent.
The fact of the matter, though, is that he provides no argument against ethnic cleansing (why won't it pave the way to peace? why should we believe he won't regretfully admit it's the lesser evil post factum?) and does not accept that any deescalation by Israel would be «part of the solution». His «retraction» of endorsement for explicit cleansing ends in justifying expansion of settlements, thus it serves as just another, cleverer defense for the slower form of cleansing that Israel conducts. "Population separation", but no statehood, no concessions, no dialogue, just more bulldozers and control points and increasingly bold settlers. He has grown up from a trigger-happy youth into a professional propagandist moving in lockstep with Bibi's long term project. Good for him.
But in any case, now you have "heard" him say they need to be removed.
I don’t see why Israel would be ‘forced to the wall’ in terms of materiel. They can borrow or be given money easily, and the global arms market is open to them.
Unlike Ukraine, it’s also unlikely for structural reasons that this would be a very long war with an extremely high use rate for munitions over a very long period.
This is one of those - ok let's see what will happen. Frankly I want the region peaceful and stopped from sending people to Europe. The peace of prosperity is prefferable. The peace of the graveyard is acceptable.
And Israel has enough material base and a lot of smart people to produce them fast. Although the aid send to Ukraine would probably have been better used in Israeli hands.
I think it's a pretty low-quality over-the-top hysterical take. Nukes flying is pretty unlikely even if America does nothing at all. Israel made it through several other full-scale wars with multiple larger countries with proper militaries without any direct foreign intervention and without nuking anybody. It's pretty unlikely they get pushed to the point of feeling the need to do that no matter what happens here.
Granted a substantial American carrier force standing by probably makes it less likely for anyone to get too carried away even without them actually doing anything, which I guess is a good thing.
Israel nuking Iran wouldn't jive with any of their western partners. You can highlight all the Iranian aid and enabling for Hamas you want, but to launch nukes on Iran prior to any other kind of soft or hard escalation would lose all but the most zionist western politicos.
This has made me respect Benji much less than I had previously. He's clearly far from impartial here and is burning his credibility to advocate for his own interests.
Can anybody tell me about the validity of the claims that Islamic Palestinians have occupied this region for thousands of years? Like given a random family currently living in Gaza, when did they likely migrate there? 1000 years ago? It was there a more recent migration of people?
The sort of “we’ve lived here forever this is our land!” Narrative just feels to clean to me.
You’re not getting good replies, and it’s a bit of a hard question to answer honestly. The question itself is very politically loaded and thus politically incorrect to investigate, and so there’s a dearth of available quality information.
It’s clear that as Jews moved from Europe to Ottoman Syria and later to Mandatory Palestine, they brought jobs and immigration along with them. However, this process was spread over roughly 100 years, so it’s hard to find a peak. Looking at demographic estimates of the region, e.g. what’s on wikipedia you can see that the local Arab population roughly doubled in the 25 years prior to the war of ‘47-‘49. This is not impossible given a high enough birth rate and improving health care that came along with British rule, so it’s not clear cut evidence one way or the other.
Further complicating the issue is that migration out of Mandatory Palestine is not counted.
Some evidence of Palestinian origins are in their last names. Al-Masri (Egyptian) is a common last name in Gaza and southern Israel, where you’d expect it - but that doesn’t mean too much after a few generations. Along those lines are also Bushnak (Bosnian), Mugrabi (Magreb, like me!), Halabi (Syrian), and probably more that I’m not familiar with.
Personally, I think it’s less than half of Palestinians world-wide who are actually “originally” from that specific strip of land, meaning that the person who left in ‘47 had a grandfather born there too. But I also don’t think it matters that much, to be honest.
Can anybody tell me about the validity of the claims that Islamic Palestinians have occupied this region for thousands of years?
Given that the average human lifespan is about two magnitudes lower than thousands of years, any person who is claiming continuous existence or continuity of experiences longer than they were alive is probably stretching a point and then some.
Like given a random family currently living in Gaza, when did they likely migrate there? 1000 years ago? It was there a more recent migration of people?
The more recent migration of random families on the Gaza strip was in 1948. In the longer term, the Levant has been invaded / conquered / settled / assimilated / conquered again so many times that demographics don't trace so linearly so nicely.
Closest people [to samples recovered from the Bronze Age and Iron Age Levant] are usually Christian Levantines > Many Jewish groups > Muslims > Other Jewish groups
Palestinian Christians are almost genetically indistinguishable from Roman-era Levantines, people of the time of Jesus Christ, the Apostles, etc.
Almost all Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the region carry noticeable Bronze Age/Iron Age Levantine ancestry. This means that almost all modern Levantines are at least partially (some overwhelmingly), descended from Israelites or people genetically indistinguishable from them
As you can see Samaritans (yes they still exist, but they are dying out) are almost indistinguishable from not just Israelites, but even Bronze Age Canaanites. Very impressive continuity. But it comes at the cost of serious inbreeding. There are only a couple hundred of them left
Everyone else (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) has mixed non-Middle Eastern ancestry, the majority of it being European (Greek and even Bactrian ancestry that entered the Levant after Alexanders conquests). Muslim Levantines also carry ~3-5% sub-Saharan African ancestry on average that Christians and Jews mostly lack, and a noticeable chunk of Arabian ancestry, but that is lower than most people would expect.
The reason Christian Levantines are closest the Canaanites, Israelites, Roman-era Jews, etc is because they never relinquished their religion, and therefore never mixed with other groups after the Islamic invasion. Those Christians who converted to Islam now had opportunities to mix with other Muslims, and even slaves from sub-Saharan Africa.
This is what it looks like happened.
The Bronze Age inhabitants of the region were Canaanites, Amorites, Eblaites, etc. The ancestors of the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, etc also came from the BA Levant.
A subgroup of Canaanites became Israelites (they are genetically indistinguishable from Canaanites). This subgroup remains largely similar to each other until Alexander conquers the entire Middle East.
Then, Greek and Bactrian ancestry start entering the Levant. At this time, Samaritans split off from the ancestors of Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the Levant.
They are the first to split off. This is because they barely mixed with the incoming Greek/Bactrian groups.
The new population Roman-era Levantines are almost indistinguishable from modern day Palestinian Christians, Lebanese Christians, etc. They stay like this till the modern period, refusing to mix with Muslim Arabs (they weren't allowed to regardless) and not usually being allowed to own slaves.
This is where Levantine Muslims (Palestinian Muslims, Lebanese Muslims, etc) split off from the Christians - some Christians convert to Islam. They are now allowed to own slaves from Africa, and mix with Arabians and Egyptians and other Muslim groups. They carry some of this foreign ancestry.
Before, during, and after Alexanders invasion you had many other Jewish groups of course, splitting off and going to Europe and North Africa, being forcibly deported to Mesopotamia, etc. They are the only ones who either
1: didnt convert to the Arabian religion
2: didnt convert to the new religion that was formed/evolved through Judaism
The truth is, everyone in the Levant is overwhelmingly descended from ancient Jews, or at the very least those genetically indistinguishable from ancient Jews.
Lots of Muslims like to exaggerate their relationship to Arabians, since that is where their religion is from, and their prophet was an Arabian. The truth, for better or worse, is that almost none of them carry much Arabian ancestry. Only Negev Bedouins and Yemenite Jews do.
A bunch of people then take him to task in the comments for not sufficiently addressing Ashkenazi Jews.
One thing that's confusing me here is his statement [slightly trimmed] "the Jewish groups splitting off and going to Europe and North Africa, etc, are the only ones who didnt convert to either Islam or Christianity". Were there no jews who never left the area but also never converted to christianity or islam? Did they just not exist, or are they just missing from these genetic samples (perhaps they so completely mixed with immigrant jews that they're no longer a distinguishable population?), or am I just blind? The closest included sample geographically is Syrian_Jew.
One thing that's confusing me here is his statement [slightly trimmed] "the Jewish groups splitting off and going to Europe and North Africa, etc, are the only ones who didnt convert to either Islam or Christianity". Were there no jews who never left the area but also never converted to christianity or islam? Did they just not exist, or are they just missing from these genetic samples (perhaps they so completely mixed with immigrant jews that they're no longer a distinguishable population?), or am I just blind?
The various Jewish Diaspora groups mostly died out or were/are very tiny. Modern Jews are mostly descended from European Jews even after the Holocaust. These European Jews are descended from a very small group that migrated from the Levant into Europe shortly after Muslims took over the Levant.
Modern day Israel likely was continuously inhabited by Jews; although at times (eg towards the end of the crusades) this number might have dropped to the high hundreds or low thousands. Damascus and other cities in modern day Syria had much higher Jewish populations for the majority of this time, and they regularly travelled across the levant. So it’s likely that any remaining ‘Judean’ Jews would be part of the Syrian Jewish grouping.
What is certain is that for much of the last 2000 years far less than 5% or in many cases even 1% of the global Jewish population lived in Israel, although a larger percentage lived in the wider MENA region.
Question to those who have researched this: how true is it that Israel helped create Hamas? The general idea being that the Israeli government provided substantial resources to baby Hamas to act as a counterweight to the PLO. Which I want to put in my quiver of "governments being too clever for their own good," but the popular sources I've seen for mostly just repeat the story without sourcing it.
Long article, but the meat of it is that Israel allowed Islamist groups in Gaza, which had been repressed under the Egyptian government, to grow in influence after the six-day war, opting to focus on secular groups like the PLO. The precursor to Hamas, Mujama al-Islamiya, was officially recognized by Israel. The Israelis stood by and watched while the Islamists fought the secularists for power in the early 80s, but they didn't actively support them. HAMAS officially formed in 1987 during the first intifada, started carrying out attacks, and the Israelis finally realized that they were dealing with a serious threat, while the PLO moved towards diplomacy.
In Gaza, Israel hunted down members of Fatah and other secular PLO factions, but it dropped harsh restrictions imposed on Islamic activists by the territory's previous Egyptian rulers. Fatah, set up in 1964, was the backbone of the PLO, which was responsible for hijackings, bombings and other violence against Israel. Arab states in 1974 declared the PLO the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people world-wide.
Brig. General Yosef Kastel, Gaza's Israeli governor at the time, is too ill to comment, says his wife. But Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who took over as governor in Gaza in late 1979, says he had no illusions about Sheikh Yassin's long-term intentions or the perils of political Islam. As Israel's former military attache in Iran, he'd watched Islamic fervor topple the Shah. However, in Gaza, says Mr. Segev, "our main enemy was Fatah," and the cleric "was still 100% peaceful" towards Israel. Former officials say Israel was also at the time wary of being viewed as an enemy of Islam.
As the fighting between rival student factions at Birzeit grew more violent, Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, then a military intelligence officer in Gaza, says he received a call from Israeli soldiers manning a checkpoint on the road out of Gaza. They had stopped a bus carrying Islamic activists who wanted to join the battle against Fatah at Birzeit. "I said: 'If they want to burn each other let them go,'" recalls Mr. Harari.
A leader of Birzeit's Islamist faction at the time was Mahmoud Musleh, now a pro-Hamas member of a Palestinian legislature elected in 2006. He recalls how usually aggressive Israeli security forces stood back and let conflagration develop. He denies any collusion between his own camp and the Israelis, but says "they hoped we would become an alternative to the PLO."
"I believe that by continuing to turn away our eyes, our lenient approach to Mujama will in the future harm us. I therefore suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face," Mr. Cohen wrote.
Mr. Harari, the military intelligence officer, says this and other warnings were ignored. But, he says, the reason for this was neglect, not a desire to fortify the Islamists: "Israel never financed Hamas. Israel never armed Hamas."
Diskin told the American envoy that although Fatah was desperate, its leadership was behaving as would be expected of people faced with such a difficult situation.
He told Jones that Fatah had thus turned to Israel for help in attack Hamas, which he termed a new and unprecedented development in Jerusalem's relations with the Palestinian Authority.
"They are approaching a zero-sum situation, and yet they ask us to attack Hamas," Diskin said. "This is a new development. We have never seen this before. They are desperate."
Diskin is also cited opposing a U.S. proposal to supply ammunition and weapons to Fatah, fearful that Hamas might get its hands on them instead.
Diskin went on to share with Jones sensitive details relating to the cooperation between the Shin Bet and the Palestinian security and intelligence forces in the West Bank.
Palestinian security was sharing "almost all the intelligence that it collects" with Israel," Diskin told Jones. "They understand that Israel's security is central to their
survival in the struggle with Hamas in the West Bank," he said, according to the cable.
The cable also exposes Diskin's concern that Abbas had begun to pose as a problem for Israel. "He's a paradox. He cannot function and do anything. Why is Fatah failing?
Because Abbas has become the 'good guy' whom everyone is trying to do everything for in order to keep him alive.
"He knows he is weak and that he has failed ... to rehabilitate Fatah. He did not start to take any action when he had the chance in 2004. Instead of choosing to be the leader for Fatah, he chose to be a national leader for all Palestinians," Diskin said, according to the cable.
A few days after the meeting with Diskin, when the clashes in Gaza had reached their peaks on June 12, Jones met Israel's then-Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin.In the cable sent to Washington, Jones said that Yadlin had been quite satisfied with Hamas' seizure of the Gaza Strip.If Hamas managed to take complete control then the Israel Defense Forces would be able to relate to Gaza as a hostile territory and stop looking at the militant group as an undiplomatic player, Yadlin apparently told Jones.A few weeks later, Israel's cabinet indeed reached the decision to relate to Gaza as a hostile territory.
A year and a half before Israel took offensive of the Gaza Strip in Operation Cast Lead, Yadlin referred to the territory as the fourth most hostile place in the world – following Iran, Syria and Hezbollah.
You know, I like this situation for how it exposes the vileness of people. The US sometimes deposes hostile leaders in its growing sphere of influence, and is content to leave sycophants in charge; charitably, it even has some compunctions to have those sycophants not be utterly psychopathic. Israel, however, plays by a harsher rulebook: it encourages the whole opposing people to fall into extremism, to then be justified in their dehumanization. And what do we get? Buck-broken power worshippers nodding approvingly: «civilization is entitled to remove barbarism».
This is purely of historical interest: it has pretty much no bearing on what Israel, Hamas, or their international allies can or should do (aside from encouraging a general rejection of clever clandestine activities). My main complaint about the sources I had found is because they were primarily interested in scoring points against Israel, so I approach it with skepticism but still do care about the history (and do enjoy keeping a collection of government fuckups).
I honestly think you can just ignore it. People still talk about rumored CIA activity in Iran and Congo in the 1950s as the reason those countries still suck today. It's nuclear grade cope and not worth considering.
If Kermit Roosevelt can take a suitcase full of cash into Iran in the 1950s and force them to overthrow their democratic leader (not actually democratic by the way, but whatever), what does that say about Iranians? Why are they so weak? Why don't they have any agency at all? It's all so stupid. The people who would blame the current situation on trivial (or even non-existent) events that happened decades ago are in fantasy land and should be treated as such.
At the same time, the attacking party is not relieved from its obligation to take into account the risk to civilians, including the duty to avoid causing disproportionate harm to civilians, simply because it considers the defending party responsible for having located legitimate military targets within or near populated areas. That is, the presence of a Hamas commander or rocket launcher, or other military facility in a populated area would not justify attacking the area without regard to the threatened civilian population, including the duty to distinguish combatants from civilians and the rule of proportionality.
That may be the conclusion HRW wants you to have, but it's not the conclusion born from HRW itself, which expounds on some of the key points in what you quoted.
To start, taking into account the risk to civilians does not mean not letting harm befall civilians as a direct result of your actions. To quote-
The laws of war also protect civilian objects, which are defined as anything not considered a legitimate military objective. Prohibited are direct attacks against civilian objects, such as homes and apartments, places of worship, hospitals and other medical facilities, schools, and cultural monuments. Civilian objects become subject to legitimate attack when they become military objectives; that is, when they are making an effective contribution to military action and their destruction, capture, or neutralization offers a definite military advantage, subject to the rules of proportionality. This would include the presence of members of armed groups or military forces in what are normally civilian objects. Where there is doubt about the nature of an object, it must be presumed to be civilian.
This is what more or less damns Gaza from a Geneva convention laws-of-war prospect. Because Hamas has extremely well established practices of conducting military activities out of civilian objects, and has been running them as the civil authority, the dual-use nature of many Hamas locations doesn't preclude them from being valid military objectives, because dual-use infrastructure that provides an effective contribution to the military action, such that their destruction, capture, or neutralization offers a definite military objective, are categorically legitimate military objectives no matter how many civilians are there. The Geneva convention rules of wars are categorical, not metric- there is no 'if you affect this many civilians, you automatically are illegal' standard.
Further, of the three categories- destruction, capture, and neutralization- you aren't obliged to pursue one over the other, especially if it's beyond your capacity. In the Gaza Strip in particular, where direct capture would be immensly difficult or even impossible, destruction (bombing) or neutralization (power networks) are valid means to target military objectives... which goes back to if they are military objectives, which goes to the presence of providing an effective contribution to the opposing party's miltiary actions. It's a qualify-in system based on threat activities, not a qualify-out system based on civilian proximity.
Which brings in the point of proportionality, which does limit attacks against valid military objectives. Despite how it's often used, proportionality doesn't relate to a 'fair' fight, or by being proportional to the other side's capabilities, or even the size of the weapon itself. To quote again-
An attack on an otherwise legitimate military target is prohibited if it would violate the principle of proportionality. Disproportionate attacks are those that may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the attack.
Which comes down to the person who judges what 'excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the attack' is. Since most military attacks in this context have previous obvious military utility- or else the human shield users wouldn't be bothering to put human shields around them- proportionality has far more to do with 'what tool you use,' in a 'don't go bigger than you need to sense,' than 'would you have an advantage,' which was already addressed at the 'are they making an effective contribution to military action' premise and can be as easy to justify as 'the advantage is the increased survival of our forces.' Proportionality in practice is about what effect you actually need to do that, i.e. how much damage do you need to do along the way.
If you can reliably kill a target with a smaller measure, excessive would be using a needlessly bigger option. However, this depends on you actually having the means to do so. Using dumb artillery instead of precision munitions would be excessive if you have the precision munitions to use, since the dumb munitions can be expected to cause incidental loss of life/damage that would be avoidable from the same advantage by a different means. However, using artillery instead of, say, a squad of snipers would not necessarily be excessive, since the advantage anticipated from the artillery could be considerably more than the advantage anticipated from the snipers when things like survival of the force are considered.
This comes to questioning the advantage incurred... but the conventions consistently leave this to the parties involved, based on what they (think they) know at the time. The more legalistic followers will tend to have things like ROE checklists for engaging certain targets, which they use to point at after the fact, but there's no actual prescribed process.
To bring this back to the question of 'if someone is using human shields,' it would depend on what they are using human shields for, and if you had a reliable means for getting the same advantage by a means less likely to kill them, but the answer by the caveats and exceptions conceeded by HRW is a easily-justifiable 'yes.'
If the human-shield user is making an effective contribution to the military action, to the point that their destruction would offer a definite military advantage, then they cease to be civilian objects and become military objectives.
Attacking military objectives is limited by the principle of proportionality.
Proportionality is scoped by the military advantage incurred by engaging the target.
The advantage engaged by the party is determined by the perspective and judgement of the engaging party.
The party's judgement would be based on what the human-shield user is actually doing, and the expected result.
Excessive comes into play when the expected results are contrasted with the benefit and the alternative means to get it.
If there's no other way to neutralize the valid military objective, but doing so would garner a concrete advantage, the human shields are not a legal obstacle to taking out the group to get the military objective they're surrounding.
TL;DR - human shields don't get to automatically nullify any plans to strike a target, but the attacker must still take care to ensure they only strike within proportion.
Hard to tell whether or not he’s concern trolling the Keith Woods1 type dissident rightists who have gone all-in on bleeding heart “isn’t this terrible” kvetching about Palestinians being bombed over the last few days. Sympathy with Palestinians won’t save Gaza from Israel, but it will boost the entire nonprofit NGO world of third-worldist sympathy organizations that ultimate encourage mass migration from the Islamic world to the West. The more sympathyposting they do, the more dead Gazan civilians they share, the more Western publics sympathize with migrants from the Islamic world.
And it’s not like anti-Zionism would end mass immigration to the West either when current flows are increasingly from everywhere where young men don’t have many opportunities in the developing world (particularly sub-Saharan Africa), most of which isn’t Israel’s fault.
That said…
Biden is getting so desperate at the southern border that he’s actually building Trump’s wall and desperately lobbying Central American countries to slow migrant flows behind the scenes, and now he’s going to import 2 million Arabs? Seems unlikely. This guy is getting clowned on in the comments, but more generally it’s hard to see Euro 2015 level migrant flows to the West coming from this. Mostly because the big European migrant flows weren’t on boats, though those were what was photogenic; they were overland crossings via Turkey and then the Balkans or Greece. The Gaza refugees face the rather substantial fact that Israel itself stands between them and the overland route to Europe. That means the migrants would be actively imported as refugees rather than simply show up.
Say what you will about Haitians and Guatemalans, they’re not Muslims, and Muslims in particular occupy since 9/11 a particular place in the American psyche. In 2017, Pew found 70% of Republicans (and almost 40% of Democrats!) said Islam wasn’t part of “mainstream American society”. Islam as a whole had a favorability of 48 points (ie. -2%). 41% of adults and 65% of Republicans agreed with the statement that Islam encourages violence more than other faiths. Trump’s Muslim ban was one of his most popular policies with absolute majority (almost supermajority) support.
So even if, for the discerning HBD aficionado, importing two million Palestinians might actually be preferable to two million Haitians, to the median (especially boomer and older) American they are in different universes. Obama in 2015 didn’t take many Syrian refugees for a reason (even though the president is generally recognized as having significant control over refugee intake), his stated goal was 10,000 total, and he reached this (across the entire conflict) in late 2016 (the US took like 1,500 Syrians total between 2011 and 2015 lol).
And there was a big culture war about that, too. Like 30+ GOP states announced they wouldn’t take any Syrian refugees etc. That was when it was 10,000 total, again. 2 million Muslim Gazans who voted for Hamas in the US is very unlikely, especially a year before an election.
1 I should add that in many ways I do respect Keith for at least being a real-world activist for his own country rather than a faceless internet agitator.
Lol, I’m certainly not defending Keith’s stupid views on Jews, they’re unsurprising - hardcore antisemitism is (not exclusively, of course) a particularly Irish thing even in the US, witness how many of the most hardcore American antisemitic DR types are of Irish descent. Sinn Fein were hardcore pro-Palestinian for decades, and while Woods disavows them now for supporting immigration, Irish nationalism has always been somewhat thirdworldist in character.
But yeah, there was a good meme I saw today (maybe retweeted by BAP, idk) about just how stupid this is for the dissident right. Antisemitism aside, the worst thing for anyone who wants to reduce immigration from the Islamic world to Europe is to signal boost sympathy for dispossessed or oppressed Muslims and their (many, many) causes. Whether or not the people of Gaza end up fleeing to the West, there are a billion others who might.
By contrast Jews are rare in Europe, and in 50 years almost all will either have left, have assimilated, or be in insular Chareidi communities largely uninvolved in secular affairs.
hardcore antisemitism is (not exclusively, of course) a particularly Irish thing even in the US
Maybe I just can’t see the water I’m swimming in but I don’t think modern Irish people are antisemitic (Keith Woods and 4chan posters excepted). The first half of the 20th century was pretty bad (like the Limerick Boycott), but since then Jews are barely talked about in Ireland because there are only like 1,000 of them. The anti-Semitic stuff I heard from Muslims and Poles in Ireland struck me as a fairly foreign thing when I first heard it.
Irish people oppose Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians for the same reason they opposed South African Apartheid: not because Jews or Boers are inherently worthy of hate but because if you squint you can sort of draw parallels with Ireland’s experience under British rule. Irish people support a Jewish leader in Ukraine because Russian actions remind them of British colonialism, they supported the Sinn Féin Rabbi when being pro-Israel meant fighting the British, they oppose the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians because it reminds them of what the British did. Everything is interpreted through the lens of our history, we’re too self-centered to be anti-Semites.
I completely agree that very very few modern Irish people are antisemitic. It is notable how many American antisemites (and dissident rightists in general, actually) are of Irish descent, and how there was in part a kind of longstanding low level enmity between Jews and Irish in some cities for many years though. My grandfather grew up in Brooklyn when it really was Irish, Italians and Jews (primarily) and always said that while the Italians and Jews typically got along mostly amenably, the Irish and the Jews didn’t, it was just how it was. Clearly that enmity predates even the foundation of Israel, so can’t be derived from sympathy with the Palestinians in that case, and while American antisemitism was generally more pronounced among Catholics than Protestants, that described both the Irish and Italians, so can’t be it. Possibly they were competing for the same kinds of things.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2rafa 6mo ago
This is statistics 101. In a world where there are a lot more Irish-Americans than there are anti-Semitic Americans, a sufficiently strong positive correlation between the two pretty much guarantees that both of the following apply:
I don't think we disagree in that case. I don't know much about Irish-Americans outside of their influence back in Ireland (they were always more bitter towards the British), so I'll take your word for it.
By stereotype when I was growing up in London in the 1990's, the Irish were more likely to be anti-Semitic than the British. Overt anti-Semitism was sufficiently rare that I couldn't gauge the truth of the stereotype. On the far left there was an element of IRA-PLO solidarity, but most Irish people in both the mainland UK and Republic of Ireland despised the IRA by this point, so that can't have been the main thing. Some of it went back to the 19th century, when Disraeli opposed devolution to Ireland and Irish Catholic politicians responded by wheeling out all the usual anti-Semitic tropes. (Even in the 1860's, Disraeli's Jewish ancestry was not an issue in mainstream British politics). The piece de resistance was a speech by Daniel O'Connell comparing Disraeli to the unrepentant robber crucified alongside Jesus and speculating about their family resemblance.
The piece de resistance was a speech by Daniel O'Connell comparing Disraeli to the unrepentant robber crucified alongside Jesus and speculating about their family resemblance.
Yeah I remember reading that, Disraeli's comeback was a good one: 'Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.'
Again I won't dispute personal experience with immigrant communities and maybe I'm just not seeing it myself, but Ireland is almost a different country to what it was 30 years ago so the historical picture of Irish attitudes could be completely accurate and yet not hold true today. There is definitely a very anti-semitic strain growing in the far-right in Ireland, but the people I know like that are young and picked it up from the internet.
Today the shoe is on the other foot.
After years of crying over Trump 'fascistic' takeover, 'migrants in cage', the cruelty of not taking every single African that shows up at the border etc, etc, we are now being told by the same journalists that 'actually genocide is good m'kay' when it's jews doing it.
I can't take the faux outrage the remaining rest of the time when it's not jews doing the hecking racism, and the current attitudes by the respected members of the media is a demonstration that it was always faux outrage.
Given the chance, he'd push the button for mass deportations of non-White Europeans and racial segregation, not to mention what he thinks of Jews.
Who would not? All people like Keith want is the sovereignty to behave like Israelis do in their sovereign nation, or even not as cruelly as they do.
One billion IQ move: signal boost empathy with and sympathy for oppressed Muslims exactly when Europe faces an ongoing migration crisis from North Africa and the Sahel (entirely Muslim) that has nothing to do with Gaza. This surely couldn’t backfire in any way 👍.
Israel isn’t going to change its ethnat policies because some Norwegian politician cries on TV about Gaza, but if the right starts sympathizing with Palestinians that’s only going to have a one-way effect on immigration. If they could get over their hatred of Jews, they’d realize that amplifying Israeli rhetoric about savage barbarians etc would be far more likely to turn European populations against mass immigration (“it could happen here soon enough”).
amplifying Israeli rhetoric about savage barbarians etc would be far more likely to turn European populations against mass immigration
And that’s exactly what the mainstream right is doing. A handful of conspiracy theorists and racialists support Hamas because they hate Jews more than brown people, yes, but I guarantee you Fox News has as hard an editorial line as Ben Shapiro.
amplifying Israeli rhetoric about savage barbarians etc would be far more likely to turn European populations against mass immigration
I think that only enables the media to shift the blame for the 'savage barbarians' rhetoric from Israelis to the right, a very convenient framing. Showing yourself capable of seeing past ethnicity/religion, and comfortably lampooning double standards seem beneficial enough to warrant the sympathy signal boost, especially if the angle is 'natives mistreated'.
Israel isn’t going to change its ethnat policies because some Norwegian politician cries on TV about Gaza
I don't care about Israel. Sure it's sad if some Israelis die brutally but it's not really my problem.
It does matter when my local government asks me to send money to Israel to fight their problems on their behalf.
If they could get over their hatred of Jews, they’d realize that amplifying Israeli rhetoric about savage barbarians etc would be far more likely to turn European populations against mass immigration (“it could happen here soon enough”).
We already did the 'fight Middle-East wars on behalf of Israel' gig and all that's got us is migrants, terrorist attacks, and more authoritarian governments suppressing right-wing political expression.
Plenty of Western leaders have called foreigners 'savages' but all that's got them is to be labelled some variation of 'nazi' aided by the media-intelligence-NGO apparatus, to be banned from media or to be criminally prosecuted.
Don't you wish you had an American President ready to label Palestine a 'shithole' country?
The only way for Western countries to stop the migrant flow is for Westerners to stop letting them in and have hard, authoritarian measures against foreigners and pro-natives.
If the same people crying about Hamas right now would have stopped crying about Trump, nazis, fascism, Charlottesville, Jan 6, AfD, Golden Dawn... Maybe I'd care.
Now all I can say is #OpenBordersforIsrael
In any case, you can find a lot of non-Jewish conservative authors and outlets who are supporting Israel.
I never said otherwise.
Weirdly, a bunch of American protestants were bamboozled into believing that they have to support Israel and enable them to rebuild the temple so Jesus can return, maybe start the rapture or something. Bizarre.
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Notes -
I live in a very progressive part of the US. I had a moment earlier today when I was surrounded by some Jewish community members/friends, and they were talking about how difficult it's been at work for them this week, because they have to put up with many of their coworkers saying "horrible things" (read: things that they don't agree with regarding the recent events). These community members are the same people who went spouting all manners of progressive talking points in so many inappropriate and unnecessary contexts over the past 5 or so years, from BLM, to covid, to Trump derangement syndrome, and so many more issues.
I'm sure I wouldn't like what these people's coworkers are saying, but I find myself feeling more than ever wanting to say to these people, "So what? You can't have everyone agree with you". I guess I'm now an expert at being around people who say things that make my blood boil. I put up with progressives at work, in my social circles, in my local community events, in stores, who constantly barrage me with their unsolicited progressive message. I not only never say anything anymore, but I act as if I'm completely unbothered. As a result, I find myself having very little sympathy, but a lot of empathy for these pro Israel progressives. I'm sure the irony is completely lost on them, but it makes me wonder how certain people can go through life with so little perspective that they feel so put upon by people with different viewpoints, yet cannot fathom that they may make others feel that way with their own, and that maybe they're wrong to do so.
What are their coworkers saying that your Jewish friends think is ‘horrible’? I can’t imagine people are saying genuine pro-Hamas stuff in a progressive regular workplace in the US, this isn’t a decolonial reading circle at Columbia.
Thankful as ever it would be considered weird to discuss politics seriously in my workplace.
You might need to expand your imagination, though it's mostly as @haroldbkny says, stuff about Israel being to blame because of their oppression of the Palestinians. Me, I stay out of that, if there's going to be sectarian violence between the Muslims and the Jews at the workplace, I don't want to be around.
(Ha ha no, it's not really the Muslims who are posting stuff like that; our Muslims are not Palestinian and mostly not even Arab. It's white people)
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I think in the context of the conversation I was having, it was mostly regarding people saying that Israel was to blame for any and all violence Hamas may do. It's also worth noting that some of the people involved work at universities, where such sentiment is more common.
How many of those Jews offended by this terrible statement were fully onboard with the George Floyd riots? The party line was that those riots were the language of the unheard, a reaction to oppression, and a civil rights movement. How many George Floyd's have Israeli police or soldiers made in Gaza?
A person who supported BLM riots, who is progressive politically, but has found a sudden sympathy for using military action to reduce wanton violence by a marginalized minority?
At my work I work with some religious Jews. To a one, they hated the riots.
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You're singing my song. I've had to deal with this over, and over, and over, and over. It's tiresome. The most common incarnation is when they're not sure they can enjoy the work of this celebrity or that celebrity anymore because they did something that was insensitive to this group or that group.
You ask "how certain people can go through life with so little perspective that they feel so put upon by people with different viewpoints, yet cannot fathom that they may make others feel that way with their own, and that maybe they're wrong to do so." (I'm tired and so I'm using direct quotes.) The answer is that.. "it's just different". People who reason emotionally will use their emotions as a justification, and if you can get them to verbalize it, they'll say "it's just different."
All people see themselves as the center of their universe, but only a minority recognize that they do. If you see yourself as the center of the universe and have no cause to correct for that assumption, decisions of "right" and "wrong" will be based entirely on emotion, all the time. No meta level reasoning necessary, because it's not like your feelings can be wrong.
I'm not rational. But I admire rationalists. And that so many people flagrantly disregard the need to be less biased irritates me to no end.
Not only that, but that person is also bombarded nearly non-stop with progressive messaging. Media, Universities, Federal Government, and social circles are all telling this person that they are 100% correct.
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There’s a lot of wiggle room in “things that they don’t agree with”. The last week has had a lot of public statements that range from disagreements on strategy and ethics for a difficult ground war to questions related to the cycle of violence to ‘that live-streamed mass shooting was faked and if it wasn’t it was a political conspiracy‘ to literally complaining The Final Solution didn’t go far enough. The imprecision of the rest of your post does not really make clear what you’re engaged with.
There’s perhaps a steelman where even the most extreme sides of that spectrum did not have a even or honest application against the Red Tribe (both that Damore was not tolerated, and that the Blue Tribe equivalents to Alex Jones were), and I’d probably agree with you for a significant part of it. But outside of the irony of it all, I don’t really see how much info there is in people only noticing when their ox is on the line.
That tweet got memory-holed.
Archive.
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Because, from their perspective, they’re obviously right, and everyone else is obviously either evil or straight up insane. Yes, enough exposure to contrary evidence might change their minds. But they don’t have it.
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Israeli Invasion Plans Target Gaza City and Hamas Leadership
From the New York Times’ report on the coming invasion (emphasis mine):
Hard not to see this turning into an unimaginable bloodbath. Tens of thousands of fighters? That tunnel guy’s YouTube video suggested they’d be extremely difficult to root out. I suppose all the hostages are living on borrowed time, if still alive. It promises to be a harsh look at the reality of modern urban warfare against a highly entrenched foe.
Are they really going to try a Fallujah? I wouldn't want to be a grunt on either side. This is going to be hell.
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I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of tunnel-gassing or some other tactic used to kill the people in them before going in. International treaties be damned. Screw going down into those things.
Israel probably doesn’t have the capacity to clear tunnels by chemical warfare, and won’t in time to help the invasion.
The reason is simple- quantity. Successful chemical warfare requires tons and tons and tons of the stuff, even in a confined space. Israel almost certainly doesn’t have that much, we’d know if they did because it’s sufficiently capital-intensive that you can’t hide it. And while it has a relatively short time frame to produce(after all, civilian chemical plants produce similar chemicals all the time), we’re still talking about months and months. And Israel wants to go in soon.
but israel/IDF had known for years if not decades about these tunnels. You are saying they have prepared for this sort of thing at all, even as an contingent solution?
Their entire policy was based on not doing what they’re about to try to do.
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Several times during WWII, the US Army was faced with similar situations involving well-fortified Japanese emplacements. In some of these instances, like Fort Drum in Manila, combat engineers pumped in thousands of gallons of mixed diesel fuel and gasoline, followed by a timed incendiary charge. I think the more modern solution typically involves thermobaric weapons. I'm not aware of any treaty since that would prohibit either, but both seem like painful ways to go out.
Yes, I would think something like this is better. If you use any type of poison gas, after you deploy it, you will eventually have to clean it out, make it safe, and check out what's in there. A major pain in the ass and high risk of friendly casualties if you don't do it perfectly. If you use flammables or explosives, then you know it's safe after the stuff goes boom and it has a little time to cool down.
Goes along with the argument I read somewhere else - poison gas isn't used anymore because it isn't a very good weapon, not because its effects are so horrible or it's banned by treaty. It was probably possible to ban by treaty because it's not a very good weapon more than being horrible.
A good rule of thumb is that if US signs some treaty about avoiding given type of weapons, it means it’s ineffective, but if it doesn’t, it is useful and practical. Compare, for example, chemical weapons, which US agreed to not use, with land mines or cluster munitions, which very much are a part of US arsenal, despite existence of treaties banning these: US is just not a signatory to these.
Even more cynically, the treaties that US is not a signatory to, simply are not worth much in the first place: the signatories to these simply don’t expect to fight a serious war that would require using these, so commitment to not use them is not worth much, because they will likely disregard their obligations soon as they do find themselves in one. See, for example, Ukraine, which happily uses these, despite being a signatory to Ottawa treaty.
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Yep, if you light the chemicals on fire, it's perfect legal and it works even better. Not too many airtight doors will withstand a fuel-air explosion in the next compartment.
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How much ordinance would it take to turn the entire Gaza strip into Verdun? I doubt that Israel has enough in its stockpile (unless we're counting the nukes), but it could theoretically be done.
My guess is that Israel will advance to the sea along a narrow front through the middle of the strip, cutting the insurgents fortified in Gaza City off from supplies and humanitarian aid being brought in from the South. How many weeks worth of provisions do you think Hamas has stocked up underground?
I did the math before out of curiosity to see how many 155mm shells it would take to cover all of the Gaza strip with the lethal radius of at least one shell's explosion. It came out to around 52 million shells. If all 250 of Israel's m109 howitzers fired at their sustained rate of fire of one round per minute (and assuming no need for maintenance etc) it would take them around 144 days. I was looking at this just to get some idea of the scales involved in all this.
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Judging by satellite imagery, there's enough farmland south of Gaza that the front doesn't have to be that narrow. There are towns like Al-Mughraqa in the way, but they are similar enough to Donbass suburbs that IDF could hire some Wagner instructors or even point teams.
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Yeah, this is looking like Mariupol 2: No Electricity Boogaloo.
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Is it possible that Israel have developed a smart even if cruel way to deal with tunnels with minimal costs to Israeli life?
Is it possible to gather data from the shelling to map them?
If they don't it will be bloodbath for Israel.
We shall see soon enough.
Apparently even chemical weapons / gas is unviable because the tunnels have airtight doors.
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I'd still like to think Bibi is smarter than this, and that this is just bluffing. I recall him saying, years ago, that a key part of his strategy against Iran was them thinking "there's a crazy guy in Jerusalem willing to do anything".
Judge people by their actions. So far, Israel's tactic has been to starve, bomb and wear out the civilian population of Gaza. The endgame is clearly a massive ethnic cleansing. There are also rumors the US has offered Egypt monetary benefits to host at least a million Gazans in a "tent city". If I were Bibi, I'd act just like he has thus far. It's the smart, cost-effective strategy. Clearly, the status quo cannot continue and Israel is trying its level best to get rid of the Gaza civilian population. But doing so, even with the backing of the US, is harder than you might think given 24/7 media.
One last thing. One theme I've harped on is Bibi rhetorically boxing himself in. He has now set expectations very high that he may simply be forced to do things he knows are foolish because it would end his political career otherwise. I understand this sounds extraordinarily callous that a man in his position would be willing to sacrifice many lives to save his political skin, but I am no longer discounting any possibility.
Bad as his position is now, his position if 5,000 or 10,000 or more young Israeli men die in the invasion of Gaza will be much, much worse.
Hand to heart, what do you think his odds of remaining in the upper echelons of Israeli politics are? He has failed catastrophically, but if he executes the «flawed but reliable tough-minded leader carrying us through the uncertain times of crisis» move well… I am not sure it'll work. But also, that's much of his expertise and genius.
He needs the core security minded Likud voter, still.
If he can successfully win in Gaza with minimal loss of Israeli life, he might be OK. But that seems unlikely if he commits to an invasion.
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Doesn't Bibi have that Berlusconi quality where you can get rubbished a dozen times but still bounce reliably back in time? Then again he's 73, but Berlusconi managed to hang on to some power almost to the end, too.
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Is there a Hamas steelmanning available?
If you mean morally: What would you do if you stood to lose everything? Not just your life, not just your family, not just money, but the ultimate goal for which your entire life and your movement struggled? If decision makers far away, who don't care about you and won't listen to you if you talk to them, are about to make choices that will forever foreclose the dream that you have dedicated your life to making a reality? What wouldn't you do in the struggle for the most important thing in the world?
Saudi Arabia was about to normalize relations with Israel, Iran might have gotten a fresh Peace Deal and stopped funding for Palestinian militias. Those two events would have been the absolute death knell for the Palestinian cause, it's not clear where they go from there. The goal of this action in the medium term isn't to achieve a just peace, it is to prevent the creation of a permanent and unjust peace. The only tool Hamas had to reach decision makers in SA and Iran was the sympathy of their populations, to obtain that they needed the Israelis to commit atrocities. And not just the garden variety bulldozings and arrests that we've all grown unfortunately rather used to, something dreadful and spectacular. Which brings us to...
If you mean strategically: Israel is now doing exactly what Hamas intended for them to do. Don't be under the impression that Hamas' plan was for Israel to surrender, or that they expected Israel to take this lying down and just let Gaza alone. Hamas' leadership absolutely intended to have all of this happen. Their goal was for Israel to do exactly what Israel is now doing. They wanted Israel to launch a ground invasion of Gaza, and they don't care about civilian casualties on their own side. Hamas is preventing civilians from fleeing the fighting, they want civilians to suffer. This upcoming fight was their goal all along.
And now they have "tough-minded" Israelis and westerners patting themselves on the back about how smart they are for giving Hamas what they wanted. On this very forum, numerous posters argue that the invasion is the smart strategy, that only a fool wouldn't invade Gaza under these circumstances. The only way they were going to achieve such a blow that Israel would not merely fall into their intended trap, but rush into it, that Israelis would openly congratulate themselves for "finally meeting tit with tat."
Leaving the steelman aside, I don't know that any of that means this war is going to work out "well" for Hamas. The fortunes of war are always a gamble, and world public opinion is fickle and built on the actions of people far outside of Hamas' control. But it is meaningful that all actors are now dancing to Hamas' tune, doing what Hamas intended them to do. Consider this comment below from @Chrisprattalpharaptr in context. This is Israel's 9/11, and they are reacting as such, there is literally no one in the USA today who defends what we did after 9/11 as wise or well considered. I'm not sure the hijackers or their masters are better off for it, but the USA is certainly worse off. I suspect a similar outcome here: Hamas might not win, but Israel will certainly lose.
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I am pro-Israeli here, but I can easily steelman this. Yes, what Hamas did was your cookie-cutter attempt at ethnic cleansing. You see, the way ethnic cleansing works is to do horrible shit to women, children and elderly and then proudly shout that from the rooftops. If you instill enough fear in the opposing ethnicity, they will vacate the premises on their own.
This is how it was done by Israelis themselves in 1948, they massacred the village of Deir Yassin and then run around literally broadcasting to rest of Arabs that they are next. By the way the extremist Israeli militia that participated in Deir Yassin massacre called Irgun was led by Menachim Begin, later a prime minister of Israel who called the massacre as "splendid act of conquest".
There are numerous other examples of successful ethnic cleansing. I can mentioned the Operation Storm during Balkan Wars in 1990s, where Croats ethnically cleansed Serbs from their territory with tacit approval of western coalition, the international tribunal even rubberstamped that it was actually not ethnic cleansing despite hundreds of thousands Serbs being effectively expelled. The formula was the same: run in, massacre anybody who refused to leave: mostly infirm, children, elderly etc. Then just enjoy wailing of their wives running before you, as they are just cheap but very authentic signal booster for those Serbs who did not get the message so far to run on the double. And now you have nice ethnically cleansed Croatia, part of EU and Eurozone, full of nice beaches and good food prepared by former soldiers that participated in the operation, with main perpetrator of the ethnic cleansing - general Ante Gotovina - considered as national hero.
Another successful ethnic cleansing is that of Germans after WW2, nobody now gives a shit about atrocities they experienced in East Prussia, currently Russian enclave or that they were expelled from Poland because Stalin literally moved Poland couple of hundreds kilometers to the west, which included German cities, or Czechoslovakia when Germans lived there for literally centuries. Nobody gives a shit about those Germans now, there is no wound on the soul of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles or Russians, this is the reality now and they will live happily ever after - until they themselves are ethnically cleansed sometimes in the future possibly.
As the last example I present the genocide of a tribe living on Catham Islands called Moriori. They had unique pacifist culture of nonviolence that was able to survive in isolation. That is until they got in contact with Māori people in 1835 - in paradox of history Māori themselves were the Moriori ancestors. Long story short, imagine slavery and genocide with the last descendand of the culture died in 1933, around 100 years after contact with Māori. Again, nobody gives a shit about Moriori, because there is now literally nobody to give a shit about, they are history complete with their unworkable pacifist culture. And Māori are now respected minority of New Zaeland complete with land rights recognition and all that.
And I think I will also close with another last example I ninjaedited here, that of ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh as it is very pertinent to the topic at hand. This instance of ethnic cleansing was made possible because the main ally of Armenians - Russia - is unable to provide any assistance, but also because Azerbaijan now has a very good geopolitical situation as being key for non-Russian supply of energy to Europe, having good diplomatic ties to Turkey as their protector as well as being on the upswing economically. There are some performative declarations from the west, but nothing will be done on practical level.
So I guess my "steelman" is that this is the reality of human nature, this is how the world worked and will work in the future. If there is anything that needs any "steelamaning", it is this first principles morality and dream of multicultural peace loving society where the whole world is full of Moriori peoples singing kumbaya together. The reality is much more ugly and the fact is that ethnic cleansing was used and will be used in the future as solution of various conflicts. In a sense I think that the Hamas attack was a success to large extent, it shows that the support is shifting away from Israel. Europe is still dependent on energy from Arab countries, Germans recently signed 15 years long contract for LNG from Qatar, and guess who is one of the largest supporter of Hamas globally. Who knows, maybe in due time we will have the same situation as with Nagorno-Karabakh, which was also a long war until it wasn't.
I've seen the Moriori mentioned dozens of times by right-wing New Zealanders going "Guess those Māori aren't so great after all, huh?", so I'd guess one would encounter such comments inside New Zealand way more.
Sure and I am using them as one of the examples now in this discussion, so we do give a shit in this sense. But it will not help Moriori people, so it is just discussion over spilled milk. Bygones are bygones, current ancestors of Māori people can just express some sympathy and move on fighting for the living nation instead of ruminating over the dead one.
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When your people have been oppressed by the enemy for 55 years they start to treat the yoke as normal, they forget what it means to be free. After all, it's not really an oppression when instead of soldiers bulldozing your farmhouse at night you get bureaucrats informing you your farmhouse violates the new safety zone requirements and has to be relocated. To remind them that they are people and not cattle you have to provoke the enemy into renewed brutality, and the only way to do it is by brutalizing the enemy.
When the plantation owner tells you, "I think we had an agreement about production quotas. It's the same on all plantations, so you can't say I am treating you unfairly. You have underdelivered, so I am forced to punish you, no hard feelings, right?" you don't organize a sit-in to renegotiate the number of lashes or the number of bales of cotton. You kill the enforcers and torch the mansion. Why would you also mutilate the sons, violate the wife and the daughters of the plantation owner in front of him before killing them? Do you really expect every other slaveowner to become so horrified by this that they release their slaves? No, they will become horrified by the atrocities and double down on the oppression, but that's your goal. The slaves have become too complacent. The indiscriminate punishments will remind them that the agreement they had with the owners was not an agreement at all.
That reasoning would still apply for the KKK trying to attack someone in order to create anti-KKK backlash.
You're really grasping for straws here.
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Isn't it significantly different because the KKK is not an ethnic group? It's not even a village. There are no "civilian" KKK populations to blend in with, to get support from, to be hidden by.
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Your country is perpetually blockaded by a neighboring country's government that doesn't want you to import anything without them first inspecting it. They cannot be persuaded by words alone to stop doing this. Therefore, you must attack them so hard that they beg for mercy.
(I'm sure there are other things Israel does to Gaza, but my understanding is that aside from imports, they do actually have sovereignty.)
Can you steelman the KKK now?
They are a mostly peaceful group of activists who oppose the presence of black people in their community. They mostly hold marches which are mostly non-violent. They hide their faces for safety reasons.
Sometimes they burn crosses, sure, but you're the weird one for taking that as some kind of threat. After all, they're mostly peaceful. Only a small minority of Klan members are violent, and the ones who aren't violent.. well, they're not legally required to turn the ones who are violent in to the authorities, are they? You can't even prove they know anything about it! They could all be autonomous agents. The burden of proof is on you to prove there's coordination.
I wasn't actually asking you to steelman the KKK. I was pointing out that steelmanning is a bad thing to do here because that kind of steelmanning ignores the actual facts. It just isn't possible to honestly steelman Hamas or the KKK, any more than I could honestly steelman homeopathy or creationism.
Oh.
I mean, did I ignore the facts of the situation re: Hamas?
That's one of those things that's literally correct but misleading. They couldn't be persuaded by words, but they could be persuaded by Hamas stopping the rockets and terrorism, on top of some words.
Wasn't there a lengthy period without Hamas-organized terror attacks before this one?
No, they still kept shooting rockets to kill Israelis.
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I've often asked people not to steelman attacks.
I never expected I'd have to say it about literal physical attacks.
And why not?
This is precisely where rationality as an ethic fails.
There are lots of very good reasons to steal from, kill, maim, even genocide your fellow man. What stands in between us and horror cannot ever solely be reason.
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Only if you believe in Jihad and martyrdom. They’re not exactly rational.
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Revenge at any cost needs no rationale, but supposing the leaders do have one:
There is no hope for the Palestinian cause so long as America is the hegemon. Therefore the only course of action is to maintain the cause alive until it falls. Therefore one must keep meeting the Israelis blow for blow and even provoke them to make sure they create enough despair in response that the movement stays alive until victory is possible.
People make too much hay of the colonial qualifier, but there is a significant parallel between the native american lost cause and this one. And it translates into similar tactics. For both sides.
?
As far as I'm aware Native resistance took the form typical of tribal warfare. It wasn't anything special except for the fact that they eventually found themselves completely outmatched in a way they hadn't when fighting comparable Indian tribes.
There's lots of parallels, from confinement to reservations, to raids on civilians and mutilation of their corpses, to more moderate forces being slowly eliminated by both sides, to the inherent tactics of guerilla and small independent parties leading coordinated raids using low tech means of insertion and communication. Even the ideological component and propaganda is somewhat similar.
If the Apache wars happened in a modern urban setting, they would look a lot like this.
The raids on civilians, mutilation of corpses, guerilla tactics and small independent parties leading coordinated raids are just regular plains Indian tactics that date back to tactics used by the original steppe people over 5000 years ago. These aren't unique to their conflicts with settled peoples. They used these same tactics against each other. The only thing unique is that the settled people had the power to force them onto reservations instead of just scattering them or forcing them into a tributary relationship, like the Chinese, Persians and Romans regularly did in Eurasia.
Of course none of this is new or specific to that particular. This is just irregular warfare against a threat with an immense technology and ressource advantage.
Come to think of it, do we have examples of conflicts of that nature where the weaker belligerent actually won?
Afghanistan, Vietnam... can't say for sure, but my impression is that most successful secessions resulted from a more advantaged power going "eh, it's not worth it", rather than the seceding one being able to withstand the full force of the who they're separating from.
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Just to add to this — a recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia would be an incredibly significant step towards ending the Arab-Israeli conflict, and with it the hope of an independent Palestine. Consequently, a bloody offensive that keeps the flames of war alive and the Arab street enraged and derails the hope of a detente between Israel and KSA might arguably be judged worth it.
According to this article, Hamas has already partially succeeded in this endeavor.
After a bloody ground offensive with Palestinian deads in the tens of thousands, any Arab-Israel rapprochement will be probably off the table for at least a decade. And if Israel shows restraint, Hamas can blast that as a victory as well.
Mission accomplished for Hamas, I guess.
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This has of course to be considered in the light of the competing Saudi and Iranian interests.
Rapprochement was happening after all with the Abraham accords before these events.
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Surely that’s just the general Palestinian case + the case for terrorist tactics, both of which have been made elsewhere many times?
That's the general outline, but I'd like more specific arguments that pertain to the current situation, without either sanewashing or "look at these evil savages who burn babies alive for fun."* (*not an actual quote)
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What do you guys think are the chances this becomes WW3? ngl I'm starting to get a little worried
None of the major non-US powers required for WW3 (Russia, India, China) have great stakes in any of this. If Russia was losing in Ukraine, I'd be more worried.
The only power that cares is the US but none of its potential adversaries in the region (Lebanon, Iran) have nukes nor are any of remaining nuclear powers willing to use theirs to defend them. So a nothingburger. Sleep tight.
I think we can cross out Russia as able to do world war now. I guess using nukes maybe. But conventionally they are essentially Italy in WW2 at best now. A very minor front participant in conventional war.
The only path to WW is with Chinas involvement.
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Either Ukraine or Something involving China (be it Taiwan, or one of the ongoing territorial disputes with India, Japan, Vietnam, Et Al) both strike me as far more likely to "go global" than anything in the Middle East.
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Worried now? The Ukraine situation has been in danger of escalating into WW3 for almost 2 years.
This is kind of trivial in comparison.
The Ukraine situation contained genuine possibilities of escalation to an European war (which still wouldn't necessarily be WW3) for about a month after it started. After that, most of the WW3 talk (in the West, at least) has not been particularly good-faith from either side - either pro-Ukrainian "This is already a WW3, the West doesn't realize it, why isn't it intervening now?" spiel or Western pro-Russian "Oh no, the nukes might start flying at any moment! The West must avoid this by dropping all support to Ukraine now!" spiel.
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Negligible, unless retroactively incorporated into the story of WW3 just because it occurred around the same time.
There aren't any great powers on the side of Hamas, only Iran, and only partially. There are chances it could escalate to a war with Iran, but that would not be a world war.
The reality is: the next world war occurs either because China attacks Taiwan, or Russia invades a NATO country. The latter is... extremely unlikely.
Prior to February 2022 i may have agreed but I nolonger share your optomism in this regard. The Balkans are right there.
The scenario where I can maybe see Putin being emboldened to do something like that is
Likely scenario? No. But not totally implausible.
Agreed, likewise the inverse. Ukraine gains a decisive win on the southern front and decides that they're going to try and retake the Crimea. Russia nukes Kherson, Odessa, Melitopol, and Chaban to stave off a total collapse, and shit hits the fan.
Again, Likely scenario? No. But not totally implausible.
What?
Not the one in the north, the one sitting on the narrow strip connecting Crimea to the mainland.
There are two narrow strips that do that, one has Armyansk (and Perekop), the other has Chongar/Chonhar.
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Very low. A world war necessarily involves at least 2 of the following: NATO, Russia, China.
I can see a path where Iran does something stupid and is promptly destroyed by the United States. But that would be where it ends. Russia already has its hands full and China doesn't seem interested in this kind of foreign adventure.
The situation in Ukraine was/is more dangerous.
I think the concern is that Iran gets involved, the US responds, but is a paper tiger of sorts causing China to take Taiwan.
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I don't think the US can "promptly" destroy Iran without nukes. And nukes make a world war very likely.
The most likely reason for Iran not becoming directly involved is geography. They can't invade without traversing the entire peninsula, and it's not like Syria and Jordan are so friendly with them they'd allow it or participate. They could presumably launch missiles, but conventional missiles don't decide a war, and they obviously invite direct retaliation.
Why? The nuke mythology --- nuclear winter this, radiation that, Fallout, "glassing", end of civilization, etc. --- creates a level of fear and hesitation in excess of what the effects of the weapons warrant. (I recall reading something about the nuclear winter concept being essentially made up for leftist political reasons in the 1980s.) If someone were to use a nuke in anger, this mythology would collapse. We'd come to understand that a nuclear warhead is merely a bomb that makes a bigger boom than other bombs and view 70 years of anti-nuke agitation as ignorant hysteria. With the "nuclear taboo" aside, why would a nuclear strike (especially a counter-force tactical nuke) cause a world war when a destructive conventional strike wouldn't?
The nuclear taboo is NOT aside. And if a nuke in the Middle East swept the taboo aside, Russia is freed to use its nuclear arsenal in Ukraine and then perhaps elsewhere... which again, brings you a lot closer to WWIII.
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They wouldn't be able to "destroy" Iran without nukes, but conventional attacks would probably be enough to destroy whatever military capability they have to project power beyond their own borders, and the political situation within their own borders is dicey enough that it's a wild card; i.e. a rally around the flag effect could help the government, or getting entangled in a foreign war to help terrorists could be another addition to the list of grievances for last year's protestors.
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From the nuclear nations which one will be willing to risk it's own existence as retaliation for Iran? Pakistan or North Korea probably? Pakistan could be bribed with Iran territory. China could be bribed with Iran's oil. Israel will be happy. Russia will gladly shrug for lesser sanctions and smaller aid in Ukraine. UK and France - meh. India - doubt it.
North Korea - who knows, but probably extremely low. The regime there is preoccupied with its own survival. Not with geopolitics at large. They seem to be happy to turn into an island.
Anyway - I think this is time to reconsider the battleship as a ship - just a delivery vehicle for dumb artillery and lots of it. That is protected by the carrier group.
Russia would be most likely, especially if lesser sanctions and smaller aid in Ukraine weren't forthcoming. Which I expect would be the case for a US arrogant enough to nuke Iran. Russia might take that as license to nuke Kyiv, for instance. But it's not going to happen; unless Iran goes nuclear themselves (which would mean they've successfully concealed completion of a nuclear weapons program), the US isn't going to nuke them. Nor Israel, unless a general Middle East war against them has already started with their backing, which also seems unlikely.
As for battleships, you can't win a war promptly with conventional artillery either. Eventually you'll have to invade. If you just keep shelling, we'll find out if Iran can figure a way to sink a carrier group.
And if I remember correctly, wargame scenarios from the early 2000's (when the Navy was arguably in better shape) showed this exact scenario going very very badly for the US. So much so that they had to redo the wargame from scratch with heavy restrictions of the Red Team general to save face.
That's what it was, the "Millennium Challenge." On further review, the range limitations in the exercise were definitely a factor, but it's still not inspiring.
Millennium Challenge. See also the top answer from the defense consultant in this. Basically, Red "won" by using loopholes in the rules that failed to model reality.
(However, be careful in reading these. Another source claims that the motorcycle messengers thing didn't happen and I have no way to research whether it's true.)
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All pathways to WW3 seem to require Iran to get involved. So far, Iran has very much not got directly involved and there were some pretty high level controlled leaks from the Iranians that they were surprised by the scale of Hamas’ attack, even if the IRGC (as reported by WSJ) may have approved some form of aggression. Iran’s relations with Hamas are more frayed than they are with Hezbollah or the Houthis; Hamas is Sunni and they were initially on opposite sides of the Syrian Civil War.
Iran lacks the ability to easily project force to Israel. While troops could march (and they’d have to go overland) through Iraq and Syria to get to Israel they would be vulnerable doing so, supply lines would be stretched, and it would annoy the Iraqi Shia militias currently making huge oil profits from Iraq’s relative state of calm. Iran has medium range missiles capable of hitting Israel, but how many they have is unknown. Israel’s options for physical retaliation would be slim, but in many ways that reduces the risk that Iran acts overly aggressive out of fear.
Iran is in a good place in the region now, and that’s especially true as long as Iraq remains peaceful and largely ruled by Shia groups allied with Iran, and as long as Assad is in power in Syria. Shuffling the deck of cards isn’t in their interest. If Hezbollah decides enough is enough and goes in the Iranians will have to make a difficult decision, but even there i think direct engagement is very, very far from guaranteed. If Hezbollah is destroyed or severely damaged, the Iranian position remains quite strong.
Supposing that Iran did launch missals, would Israel be able to distinguish between conventional missals and WMDs (be they chemical and nuclear)?
And given that they wouldn't know the content of the missals launched by Iran, Israel would have to assume that they might be WMDs. By this I mean to say that a rockets from Iran to Israel might have the same problem as rockets launched from Russia to the USA, it would risk nuclear escalation given that you cannot determine the content of the missals, and given that there is a possibility that the missals are in fact a nuclear first strike.
Given the risk of escalation it it would seem unlikely that Iran proper directly attacks Israel.
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You are assuming that the only way the war might propagate to Iran is if Iran decides to. But Israel could very well decide that for them. Iran has been weakened by recent anti regime protests and Israel's government needs to prove they do something about the security of their citizen without hurting Hamas too much because Hamas has hostages. It's not the most plausible issue, but game-theoretically hurting Iran is somewhat sound, just like nuking Belarus as a retaliation against Russia (see The Bomb by Fred Kaplan)
I imagine the US told Israel and Iran “we are putting two carrier groups close to Israel. Israel will not attack Iran. If Iran does anything the carrier groups will attack Iran.”
Really decreases the odds either party “starts” something.
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It’s unclear Israel has the means to directly attack Iran other than with nukes.
Can you explain? Why couldn't a conventionally armed F-16, F-35, or missile without a nuclear warhead reach Iran?
Too far away. I looked it up for a previous comment on this thread.
Basically the published combat range of the aircraft in their inventory just barely reaches the closest border of Iran over the most direct possible route. Any worthwhile targets are even further. And those routes go over Jordan and Iraq, both of which are not particularly friendly to Israel. Any attempts to avoid them or fly evasive routes to be less visible to their air defense just makes the range problem even worse. The Israeli air force does have some tanker aircraft in inventory, but one or more midair refuelings in hostile airspace sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Missiles may be possible, but missiles without nukes just aren't very destructive and may not be worth the bother. A conventionally-armed missile is a strange enough thing to do that it's probably reasonable for any country to assume any medium range ballistic missile is nuclear and respond accordingly.
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Israel might start with Hezbollah. It's a more realistic target than Iran, and it would be more explanable to the population (we can't get rid of the Hamas because hostages but we will get rid of hezbollah). I don't really believe it will happen, it's just something possible
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Both countries have conventional missiles that can reach the other.
Unclear in what quantities. At least for Israel analysts seem to think the number of medium range non-nuclear missiles capable of hitting Tehran is very modest.
What if they were launched from a bomber?
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Very low.
If Israel drags both Sunni and Shia powers into the war, things will be unfortunate, but there will not be a united front for very long. I would expect that regional tensions between Iran and KSA will actually decrease temporarily, then the united front will fracture over time as the desires of the governments diverge from that of their populace and trust disintegrates.
I think we're less likely to see this war lead to the destruction of Israel, or WWIII, than we are to see it lead to further disintegration of MENA governments when they refuse to invade Israel as their populace demands.
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The most likely path to this resulting in WW3 is several other actors deciding that now is the time for military adventurism because of America's finite response capacity.
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When I created this megathread, here is what I posted to the moderator Discord:
My understanding of military decisions is exclusively historical and political, so I can't speak to the nuts and bolts of this, but every conflict like the ones in Ukraine and Israel opens the door a little wider for attacks of opportunity elsewhere. I am skeptical that China will ever invade Taiwan--the economic benefits of just rattling sabers at them for all of eternity seem far better than the ideological benefits of burning the island to cinders. I sometimes wonder if Taiwan is allowed to be what it is because someone in China read Brave New World and decided that an island of malcontent exiles was a pretty good idea, actually.
But their ability to get away with an invasion of Taiwan is certainly increased by contemporaneous conflict elsewhere.
Other contenders for the "next front in World War III" presumably include Iran and North Korea, ye olde Axis of Evil, but there are plenty of other places that could qualify. The flood of migrants arriving in Europe and the United States every day may be driven primarily by economics, but one of the worst things for any economy is armed conflict, and it is at some level armed conflict that almost all such migrants are ultimately fleeing. How much of the world needs be at war, to call it a World War?
Vox Day had some discussion on his site around the possibility of this spilling out into WW3. Basically it was through considering Ukraine/Russia, Iran/Israel and China/Taiwan as separate fronts. China and Russia both gain from flashpoints such as what is happening in Israel, as it draws focus and resources away from their spheres.
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A world war is when the war is global. Even 10 local conflicts don't make a world war until there are two sides and japan allies with germany even though they are not fighting on the same continent. And by that, I mean that they declare war and peace together, not that they are allies in that they help each other somehow.
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When white and honorary white start to die in sufficient quantities. You also missed the Nagorno Karabakh in "list of things that hit the fan recently" that I think is also result of embolden adversaries and weakened russia.
I always thought of the current axis of evil as laughable. All the countries there are pathetic and china wants not a part of it.
The Armenia thing is interesting. It’s one thing ethnically cleansing 30,000 Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, quite another occupying a hostile nationalist population a third the size of your own with a different religion and 2000 year history.
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How?
Ground invasion -> Hezbollah -> USA -> Iran -> more shit idk until it's Armageddon
I admit not being exactly rational here (part of what I meant by "worried") that's why I'm asking this space
Sure, a wider Middle-Eastern war is possible, but quite a bit of a road to a genuine world war even from there.
A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray. Turkey is very worrying wild card and they will have zero resistance if they invade bulgaria and greece. Which have nothing to stop them with. And Ergodan has some ottoman restoration dreams. They may not even have to revoke the NATO membership to make things even more confusing. And they have couple of million of refugees that they can draft.
So right now western powers have choice - protect what is left of Bulgaria - mostly Sofia, northern parts above the Balkan mountains. Protect serbia or protect Vienna. Throw the mess in Ukraine. Assume that suddenly all those muslims we already accepted suddenly decide to cause trouble - no matter if provoked or not. So you will soon have a lot of crises. And you are just one or two in asia to have world war. Thank got that latin america is peaceful at least (in not a keg of powder sense)
Assad is still cleaning up a civil war and attempting reconstruction. Egypt under Sisi certainly isn’t going to get involved in defense of Hamas / the Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan isn’t either after their own history with the Palestinians.
So a “whole middle eastern war” against Israel involves who - maybe Hezbollah, Hamas and some Iranian support (probably not boots on the ground, though)? Maybe Iraqi Shia militias, although they don’t want a war now they’re in power there? the Gulf Arabs don’t want a victorious Iran turning its attention toward the holy cities and the gulf.
It’s all possible, of course, but is it likely? I don’t know.
Is hezbollah likely to get involved? I would think that the time to do so for them had already happened.
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Indeed; the West Bank Palestinians are more or less a poison pill preventing Jordan from invading, even if Jordan would otherwise want to. Same on for Gaza Palestinians and Egypt.
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How is turkey going to succeed against greece and bulgaria where russia failed against ukraine, when they will get much more support, and presumably want to become turks even less than ukrainians want to become russians? Turkey’s military budget is 11 B (source) and greece 8 B, bulgaria 1B (This is a clue that bulgaria, contrary to greece, doesn’t think turkey is a threat to it). Given the budget ratio was 10-to-1 against ukraine, I will put turkey’s chances of conquering bulgaria and greece at approximately 0.
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Why would it mean that though? There have already been at least 3 wars (48, 67, 73) involving full-scale armies from multiple Arab nations attacking Israel, and they haven't fallen yet.
On paper, the Arab nations would appear to have ample forces to do the job. But historically, they've had trouble actually coordinating and committing to attacks. I see no reason to presume that that has changed. Syria and Egypt seem to have enough internal problems these days that it's hard to see them pulling off a large-scale offensive action.
Please describe other types of wide middle eastern war? Don't forget that the previous wars were waged against secular governments. I don't know the current state of pan arabism but I think that it is ripe for one to try and get the reigns.
I don't understand? You asserted that "A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray". Exactly what war are you picturing that would plausibly lead to Israel falling without direct intervention? I mentioned several actual wars that happened. Multiple times, the nations surrounding Israel united to attack them, and each time, Israel did not fall. A number of other wars have also happened in the Middle East, none of which involved Israel at all or led to them falling.
I actually can't think of any war in the modern era in which any of the Arab nations displayed impressive offensive capability, as in assembling a large force and sending it outside their borders to capture foreign territory held by determined adversaries. Usually they only attack each other, and mostly bog down pretty quickly unless the region they're attacking basically gives up to them. They tend to smash their faces into a brick wall every time they try to attack territory held by Westernized forces.
Whether you or I think that the area is "ripe" for a united pan-Arab movement now, the fact is that it's been tried a bunch of times over the last century and failed every time. I don't see any reason to expect anything to be different now.
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Turkey isn’t going to war with Greece any time soon. The country’s membership of NATO is central to all of its defense plans and pretty important to its national identity. Entirely possible it gets drawn into the next round of Armenia-Azerbaijan though.
Probably true 15 years ago. Erdogan has played with both turkish nationalism and islamism. I wouldn't be so optimistic. The west didn't accept Turkey as equal, I am not sure at least in the mind of the elite they want to be accepted any more.
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Agree, but the likelihood is now higher than it was previously. If a set of global conflicts emerge with even loosely defined lines, I would expect it to be a product in no small part of opportunism in the face of the United States being spread too thin to be a reliable partner in stopping something like an attack on Taiwan. I don't really know how to put a meaningful percentage guess on the likelihood, but the combination of resources and materiel drained into Ukraine and naval assets being deployed to assist Israel commits the American military to a greater extent than is typical.
It seems like everyone always leaves out the possibility that China just... takes Taiwan. Like if the US does get spread pretty thin and China takes the opportunity, that doesn't automatically mean WWIII happens. Frankly, the thinner the US gets spread, the lower the odds of Taiwan being sufficient to trigger the war.
If the US is totally dominant, then China will wait and so no war occurs. If the US is severely weakened, then China will simply take Taiwan with minimal US intervention, and no world war occurs. It's only in some weird middle ground, where China perceives the US as spread too thin but the US still commits to defending Taiwan, that there's any risk of something major.
Of course, I've never been the worrying sort, and I'm not as opposed to war as the average person, so maybe I'm just underestimating the odds.
We've already seen the tendency of autocratic regimes to overestimate their own military capabilities in the current Ukraine-Russia war. And islands are notoriously easy to defend/hard to attack. If China just marches in and takes over, you're right. If China miscalculates, the first landing fails and the war turns into a longer slog/siege, the western public will most likely want to support Taiwan, similar to how it went with the Ukraine. Which may not guarantee WW3, but it adds another roll of the dice, and destabilizes the world further.
I agree with your overall point entirely, but this gets me thinking: would the western public have supported Ukraine if the US military/intelligence community didn't make sure that happened?
Most people's position on the war doesn't seem to be rooted in serious principles, and I have no doubt that if the regime pulled a Eurasia/Eastasia flip tomorrow, most of the public would follow.
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I don't think so. Keith's perspective is missing and most of the anti-Zionism in the West is typically very leftist. I think folks like Keith Woods bring the perspective that Zionism is responsible for instability and unrest in the Middle-East and thus brings floods of refugees to Europe. Jewish Zionists living in the West then shame White people to take them into our countries - even as they support ethno-nationalism for themselves. So nationalism when in Israel but liberalism in the diaspora. So far, I agree with Keith's analysis.
Where I differ with Kieth is that I think this is actually the common norm among most ethnic minorities. He makes it sound like Jews are outliers. I've often talked about Turks living in Germany, NL, France etc but there are many other examples.The main difference is not behavior per se but power. The Jewish diaspora is infinitely more powerful and influential than whatever little crumbs that Turks, Kurds, Armenians or any other Middle-Eastern group get off the table, despite often being far more numerous than Jews - at least in Europe.
In other words, it's White people who are abnormally non-tribal rather than Jews being unusually tribal. Jewish tribalism makes much more political and social impact because of relative power differentials favouring Jews compared to other ethnic minorities who are much less influential. But that doesn't mean those other minorities' fundamental patterns of behaviour are any different.
Anti-Zionism is (in the US, at least), profoundly anti-establishment. The anti-establishment right didn't have a megaphone until Trump walked down the escalator in 2016, and this is the first time since then that Israel-Palestine has been the current thing. But "why can Israel oppose immigration but the US can't" and "why can Israel play to win with the Palestinians when the US has its hands tied in Iraq" where both fairly common memes on the anti-establishment right back in the noughties. (Practically every commentator on the Unz review plus Moldbug)
Unlike the anti-establishment left, the anti-establishment right isn't consistently anti-Zionist, because it includes rabid Islamophobes who support Israel on enemy-of-my-enemy grounds, and wackjob Christians who support Israel in order to immanentize the escheaton. But the natural position of the anti-establishment right is that Israel is just another country and the US should not spend money defending them for the same reasons as Ukraine.
The left may not be consistently anti-Israel, but even when not actually anti-Israel, it's anti-a lot of things Israel does, including border walls. So the answer is "pretty much nobody who opposes limits on immigration in the US supports it for Israel".
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How many of the refugees currently in Europe are due to instabilities precisely provoked by Israel, though?
The biggest refugee movements to Europe in the past decade, if I've understood correctly, can be connected to the destabilization and war in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. In case of Iraq, there's a direct argument to be made that Israel lobbied America to invade, though this was hardly the only factor leading to Bush admin to make this move.
However, in case of Syria, my understanding is that the primarly supporters of the anti-Assad rising that then became a civil war was not Israel - which of course hated Assad but didn't evince a particular wish for the opposition to take over either - but the Gulf States and, later, Turkey. One could argue that Israel preferred a destabilized, riven Syria to either party winning, but even then you'd have to make an actual argument as to how, exactly, Israel played its cards to make that happen, rather that a long civil war is simply what happens when you have two armies of roughly equal strength and also foreign countries (Turkey, Russia) willing to directly intervene to save their preferred side's bacon.
Insofar as Libya goes, my understanding is that Gaddafi had recently tried to make amends with Israel, and I don't think I've seen anyone in particular blame Israel for the Libyan Revolution (and its failure), and US war in Afghanistan - again, if my understanding is correct - was considered by Israelis a sideshow, a distraction from the more important cause of invading Iraq and Iran. Furthermore, IIRC even in case of Iraq, the initial refugee waves of the war in 2003 and the following breakdown of order went to the neighboring countries, and only the 2015 refugee wave triggered by breakdown of Syria and Libya led to a wider Iraqi movement to Europe.
Of course, if one thinks that there's literally nothing in the world that happens without the Jewish/Israeli hidden hand at play it's natural to blame Israel for all of these, but I'd really need to see a more comprehensive argument for major Israeli involvement in most of these cases.
That's obviously a big issue as well (even moreso), I just wanted to comment on whether you can say that Zionism in even the narrow sense (ie. support for actual country of Israel, or the actual country of Israel's actions abroad) can be blamed on the conflicts leading to the refugee crisis in this way.
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I think there’s a more innocuous way that this helps the dissident right, which doesn’t involve summoning the specter of anti-semitism. It’s as simple as: “look at this people proud of their bloodline, who make their ancestry the focus of their relationship with God Himself, who never dwell on any historical guilt on their part (such an idea is anathema), who impugn the whole world’s history with the guilt of hating them without cause, who have legislated in Israel to keep a portion of their bloodline pure forever, who deny the atrocities they committed in the founding of their Lebensraum (PDF warning / bottom of pg 83) (so boldly in fact that they accuse the victims of atrocities in the same breath), whose lawmakers call for ethnic cleansing without blemish to their reputation.”
Rather than leading to a hatred of Zionist Jews, this would lead to a love and admiration of them as an exemplar of behavior for Western conservatives.
It can be both. Sometime, a white racist says that black people are racists too, and it means two things: (1) they are racists, because there is no such thing as human rights, equality or whatever, everyone just fights for his own people; (2) they are racists, so it's better for us to be racist against them, because they are dangerous to us. Those two claims are complementary. But there are still holes in that theory, the first one beeing how you establish the boundaries between your people and the rest of the world, and the second one that the existence of bad people is no argument against morality.
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There are several related but distinct reasons why opponents of progressivism may think the war in Israel can help with the ongoing vibe-shift.
(1) Discrediting fringe leftists. Cheering on murder of babies and rapes etc. is a very bad look, and the videos we got out of Israel are way more disturbing and graphic than most content that will have come to normies' attention in a long while. A loss of status for fringe leftists will shift power back to normies and centrists within their respective left-wing parties/organisations/ecosystems who are easier for everyone else to deal with.
(2) Enshrining speech norms. Classic "I never thought leopards would bite my face" stuff. Inevitably there will be some overreactions involved in (1) and there will doubtless be some people who get fired/censured/book deals cancelled etc. for fairly milquetoast anti-Israeli rhetoric. This provides more common ground for progressives and everyone else when determining speech norms. This doesn't mean the scales will drop from progressives’ eyes and they'll decide free speech is good actually, but it's far more likely two sides will come to a compromise peace when the casualties are high on both sides rather than just one.
(3) Deepening anti-Muslim immigration sentiment. The scenes that really seem to be serving to epater les normies so far are the images of angry mostly middle eastern men everywhere from London to Paris to Sydney to even small towns like Brighton shouting extreme slogans, wearing somewhat unsettling garb (balaclavas, veils, lots of black), and generally demonstrating their alienness to their host cultures. This will contribute, I suspect, to the ongoing realisation among Europeans that not all immigrant groups are equal and muslim immigrants in particular bring a host of problems. It might be another decade until Europeans really start responding (and by then it might be too late) but this might hasten the realisation.
(4) Breaking Jewish support for the left. This is a much more patchy and country-specific phenomenon, but needless to say, Jewish citizens in Western countries tend to be wealthier, more educated, and more influential than the median citizen. To the extent that the current shitshow from the left manages to alienate them such that they plough their resources behind centrists and other non-progressives, so much the better.
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It's pretty hypocritical because antisemitism is a major driver of Zionism. When Jews have to flee, they go to Israel. Obviously those antisemits don't care about Palestine (when have they be interested about dead arabs anyway?)
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@SecureSignals quotes Hanania but not his cleverest recent tweet. I think DR is irrelevant. Here's something that gets at the heart of the issue:
According to this argument, this will «open people's eyes to "Jewsish power" in the West» in the sense that it'll teach right-wingers to directly appeal to it, to legitimize their own, by default low-status and illegitimate, political demands. The great mass of whites can be pissed upon by progressives for decades; but if you bludgeon them over the head with their documented support of genocidally anti-Semitic Muslims, suddenly there's a chink in their armor and you can have their policies rolled back.
I don't think this can work, nor is this even a novel idea; but have to once again applaud Hanania's poasting power.
Out of curiosity, how would you describe this particular kind of settler activity and why does «pogroms» not apply? In Russian, погром means simply «trashing» or «smashing» or perhaps «wrecking» a community.
We both know that in not-Russian, pogrom describes wrecking a certain kind of community. Compare: чай vs chai.
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It's very strange premise by Hanania.... the establishment is anti-white and philo-semitic. And for that matter, the anti-white consensus in the establishment rode the coattails of philo-semitism, so it's far more plausible to say the anti-white consensus and philo-semitism came from the same source than the ahistorical claim that anti-Semitism and anti-White ideology both come from socialism.
I don't think that's what he's really saying there. The point I believed he was making was that socialism, anti-semitism and anti-whiteness all spring from people who are losers, not because there's a big connection between the three ideas but because extremists of any political stripe tend to be losers who overcompensate for their failures by embracing political causes in a way that tends towards the extreme.
That said I think his post is wrong anyway, so please don't take this as me defending him.
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Usually (fellow Cyrillic user here) pogroms in the west are understood as - when the rest of the village gathers their pitchforks and deals nasty stuff to the minority. It doesn't include formal direct use of state power.
I understood them to only involve state power indirectly - a pogrom may be directly the action of independent individuals, but is only really possible if the proper state powers ignore them.
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I remember you know Russian. Jews, at least, believe that the archetypal modern pogrom was encouraged by state actors:
Cossack pogroms were also not simply about villagers-with-pitchforks.
I agree that pogroms are supposed to be bottom-up, but they largely are even in this case – the settlers have long been raring to go, and Israel as an ethnonationalist country naturally complies with the people's wishes more than could be expected in the Russian Empire.
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Keith Woods actually catches a lot of flak within the dissident right for being genuinely pro-Palestinian, he's maintained that position for years now. Most of the DR is anti-Zionist and ambivalent towards the Palestinians at best, Keith is an exception who identifies with the Palestinian struggle.
The anti-Zionism you are describing, which certainly exists, has existed within a fundamentally different strain of ideas than what could be considered anti-Semitism in the European tradition. That anti-Zionism is downstream from Marxist, anti-Colonial, anti-apartheid interpretations of history and influence on academia. There has been much debate over the line where the anti-Zionist stance begins to borrow influence from more traditional anti-Semitism, but there's been a very clear delineation for the most part.
While there has been more or less a handle on traditional European anti-Semitism in public consciousness and the public square, the quasi-Marxist anti-Zionism has been much more difficult to suppress. This means, in practice, while there is much protest over Jewish colonialism it is still taboo to talk about Jewish influence in American political or cultural life in any critical measure. I think what the DR hopes for is for this crisis to begin to bridge the gap between the two in the public discourse. The power, hypocrisy, and bloodlust coming to a head opens up the conversation to much more than just debates about colonialism.
We've noted in this thread how Keith exploded in popularity based mostly on a couple of Elon Musk retweets. Richard Hanania tweeting something like:
Which received an emoji reply from Elon Musk is an example of the Israeli-Palestinian question expanding from its anti-colonial walled garden to tougher questions that have not been featured on college campuses or in school curriculum.
Likewise, Tucker Carlson recently gave some critique of American support for Zionism that threw Ben Shapiro into a blind rage on his show. Carlson's critique is fundamentally different from the left-wing anti-Zionism you are talking about. The DR is correct to pick up on the discourse getting closer to their own critique of Zionist influence in the West, which is closer to traditional European anti-Semitism and not simply an application of a Marxian anti-Colonialism argument.
I’d say Carlson’s criticism is more the traditional libertarian argument against overseas entanglements. Like the Marxist anticolonialist argument this occasionally borrows from ‘traditional antisemitism’ but isn’t really the same thing. Zionism and Israel aren’t really relevant to traditional antisemitism and unless there’s a big conflagration in Israel nobody on the more staunchly antisemitic side of the dissident right really cares about Israel. The only use for it is as a cudgel in accusations of hypocrisy. In Ben’s case though, while he isn’t sympathetic to wignatism, his position on illegal immigration at the southern border (and in general) is no more generous than that of such gentile figures as Trump or DeSantis, has criticized the legal immigration system for “favoring third world immigrants” and has argued that limiting legal immigration on grounds of culture and projected welfare usage are both acceptable to him. That puts him on the hard right of GOP in the US - as Hanania noted this week - and so painting him as a ‘traitor’ or whatever is kind of ridiculous when his position on immigration isn’t different to the average Fox host’s and isn’t even oceans away from Carlson’s.
In truth the DR doesn’t really want to accept that the number of hardcore Jennifer Rubin “mass immigration for thee but not for me” types (and even Rubin considers Israeli colonization of the West Bank a “racist” project that she opposes, and has spent more of the last week criticizing Netanyahu contra Biden than anything else) are actually pretty rare. Most hardcore Zionists are in Israel and don’t care about American domestic policy at all, while many hardcore pro-immigration blue haired Jewish college activists consider Israel a racist apartheid state. In between there is some hypocrisy, but I think the fair callout is that the DR:
a) Doesn’t actually care about Israel going full ethnonationalist, and with few exceptions has little or no sympathy with Palestinians
b) Would hate the views of the HIAS-type immigration activists and leftists just as much even if (and even when) they completely disavowed Israel and Zionism (and therefore could not be accused of any hypocrisy on this issue).
There was also a latent anti-Semitism in the libertarian anti-interventionist movement represented by those like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul. The association of "Neocons" with Zionists in the American policy apparatus was fairly ubiquitous there, and complaint about Zionist influence in American foreign policy is certainly an echo of traditional European anti-Semitism and distinct from the anti-Colonial arguments.
Ben Shapiro famously tweeted that "And by the way, I don't give a damn about the so-called 'browning of America.' Color doesn't matter. Ideology does." But of course, when it comes to Israel he massively cares about demographics, although he can hide behind the unique fact that membership to his "ideology" is genetically inherited.
I don't necessarily disagree that Ben Shapiro represents the "most right" you can go on that issue in the mainstream, but that's kind of the point. It demonstrates the gatekeeping. You can oppose immigration up until you start presenting arguments motivated by a white identity and character, or advocating for the interests of white people. People like Ben Shapiro have been absolutely essential in keeping those gates, so him representing the "maximum kosher" anti-immigration posture would be evidence for the DR argument instead of against it. If Ben Shapiro acknowledged the validity of white identarian arguments against demographic change you would have a point, but he does not do so. Shapiro's ethnic fanaticism is also represented by his recent rant against the West for "latent Jew hatred." So he doesn't care about the browning of the West, but he really does care about the latent Jew hatred of the West, despite how the West has bent over backwards to accommodate the Jews in the past several decades. It's par for the course.
The DR's position doesn't rely on the number of Jennifer Rubins, it relies on an analysis of the broader popular culture and academic consensus which pathologizes white identity and sacralizes Jewish identity. The number of people who pathologize white identity and worship Jewish identity is very high among both Jews and whites.
I don't see very many DR people pretending to care about the Palestinians per se (there are some, sure). Israel absolutely matters here because it exposes this consensus as being a farce, it's just an exercise in Jewish power rather than a morally consistent framework derived from truthful moral enlightenment.
It can be very easily argued that ben Shapiro’s problem with hamas is ideological. He often mentions that there is a large amount of Palestinians living in Israel. I haven’t heard him say they need to be removed.
And I think it can be very easily argued that people like Shapiro are afforded quite a bit more charity than other people. Transfer is not a dirty word, Ben'2003:
Now, granted, he was 19 at the time. Perhaps he has mellowed out, realized there are still softer ways to solve conflicts… As did Hanania.
Incidentally, like a third of Israeli population is younger than 18.
On the object level, I even agree with him that population exchanges and land swaps work. As does overwhelming power.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/so-heres-giant-list-all-dumb-stuff-ive-ever-done-ben-shapiro
That article is the first on his list of dumb stuff he’s said, and retracts.
"inhumane and impractical":
Ben really is very good at kvetching and handwringing. Every time I notice such an amusing character and see how much attention and respect American conservative gentiles afford him, I also remember my more hot-headed sentiments about… well, we all can grow up to some extent.
The fact of the matter, though, is that he provides no argument against ethnic cleansing (why won't it pave the way to peace? why should we believe he won't regretfully admit it's the lesser evil post factum?) and does not accept that any deescalation by Israel would be «part of the solution». His «retraction» of endorsement for explicit cleansing ends in justifying expansion of settlements, thus it serves as just another, cleverer defense for the slower form of cleansing that Israel conducts. "Population separation", but no statehood, no concessions, no dialogue, just more bulldozers and control points and increasingly bold settlers. He has grown up from a trigger-happy youth into a professional propagandist moving in lockstep with Bibi's long term project. Good for him.
But in any case, now you have "heard" him say they need to be removed.
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Ben Shapiro says that it's very important that America provide material aid to Israel, otherwise nukes may start flying. https://twitter.com/restoreorderusa/status/1712954326652424658
I don’t see why Israel would be ‘forced to the wall’ in terms of materiel. They can borrow or be given money easily, and the global arms market is open to them.
Unlike Ukraine, it’s also unlikely for structural reasons that this would be a very long war with an extremely high use rate for munitions over a very long period.
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This is one of those - ok let's see what will happen. Frankly I want the region peaceful and stopped from sending people to Europe. The peace of prosperity is prefferable. The peace of the graveyard is acceptable.
And Israel has enough material base and a lot of smart people to produce them fast. Although the aid send to Ukraine would probably have been better used in Israeli hands.
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I think it's a pretty low-quality over-the-top hysterical take. Nukes flying is pretty unlikely even if America does nothing at all. Israel made it through several other full-scale wars with multiple larger countries with proper militaries without any direct foreign intervention and without nuking anybody. It's pretty unlikely they get pushed to the point of feeling the need to do that no matter what happens here.
Granted a substantial American carrier force standing by probably makes it less likely for anyone to get too carried away even without them actually doing anything, which I guess is a good thing.
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Nuclear exchange with whom, though? This is some "violent clashes" journospeak. Just say "if you don't help, we'll nuke Tehran".
Israel nuking Iran wouldn't jive with any of their western partners. You can highlight all the Iranian aid and enabling for Hamas you want, but to launch nukes on Iran prior to any other kind of soft or hard escalation would lose all but the most zionist western politicos.
This has made me respect Benji much less than I had previously. He's clearly far from impartial here and is burning his credibility to advocate for his own interests.
That was premised on escalation, on them having to fight Lebanon, Syria and Iran at the same time.
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Can anybody tell me about the validity of the claims that Islamic Palestinians have occupied this region for thousands of years? Like given a random family currently living in Gaza, when did they likely migrate there? 1000 years ago? It was there a more recent migration of people?
The sort of “we’ve lived here forever this is our land!” Narrative just feels to clean to me.
You’re not getting good replies, and it’s a bit of a hard question to answer honestly. The question itself is very politically loaded and thus politically incorrect to investigate, and so there’s a dearth of available quality information.
It’s clear that as Jews moved from Europe to Ottoman Syria and later to Mandatory Palestine, they brought jobs and immigration along with them. However, this process was spread over roughly 100 years, so it’s hard to find a peak. Looking at demographic estimates of the region, e.g. what’s on wikipedia you can see that the local Arab population roughly doubled in the 25 years prior to the war of ‘47-‘49. This is not impossible given a high enough birth rate and improving health care that came along with British rule, so it’s not clear cut evidence one way or the other.
Further complicating the issue is that migration out of Mandatory Palestine is not counted.
Some evidence of Palestinian origins are in their last names. Al-Masri (Egyptian) is a common last name in Gaza and southern Israel, where you’d expect it - but that doesn’t mean too much after a few generations. Along those lines are also Bushnak (Bosnian), Mugrabi (Magreb, like me!), Halabi (Syrian), and probably more that I’m not familiar with.
Personally, I think it’s less than half of Palestinians world-wide who are actually “originally” from that specific strip of land, meaning that the person who left in ‘47 had a grandfather born there too. But I also don’t think it matters that much, to be honest.
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Given that the average human lifespan is about two magnitudes lower than thousands of years, any person who is claiming continuous existence or continuity of experiences longer than they were alive is probably stretching a point and then some.
The more recent migration of random families on the Gaza strip was in 1948. In the longer term, the Levant has been invaded / conquered / settled / assimilated / conquered again so many times that demographics don't trace so linearly so nicely.
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This is old, but gold: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-evIyrrjTTY
An absolutely evergreen video.
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Fascinating thread on the genetics of the area from a few days ago:
A bunch of people then take him to task in the comments for not sufficiently addressing Ashkenazi Jews.
One thing that's confusing me here is his statement [slightly trimmed] "the Jewish groups splitting off and going to Europe and North Africa, etc, are the only ones who didnt convert to either Islam or Christianity". Were there no jews who never left the area but also never converted to christianity or islam? Did they just not exist, or are they just missing from these genetic samples (perhaps they so completely mixed with immigrant jews that they're no longer a distinguishable population?), or am I just blind? The closest included sample geographically is
Syrian_Jew.The various Jewish Diaspora groups mostly died out or were/are very tiny. Modern Jews are mostly descended from European Jews even after the Holocaust. These European Jews are descended from a very small group that migrated from the Levant into Europe shortly after Muslims took over the Levant.
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/ashkenazi-jewish-genetics-a-match
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Modern day Israel likely was continuously inhabited by Jews; although at times (eg towards the end of the crusades) this number might have dropped to the high hundreds or low thousands. Damascus and other cities in modern day Syria had much higher Jewish populations for the majority of this time, and they regularly travelled across the levant. So it’s likely that any remaining ‘Judean’ Jews would be part of the Syrian Jewish grouping.
What is certain is that for much of the last 2000 years far less than 5% or in many cases even 1% of the global Jewish population lived in Israel, although a larger percentage lived in the wider MENA region.
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Interesting, the Samaritans are the closest (virtually identical because of endogamous marriage) to the ancient bronze age Canaanites:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sca_esv=573522448&q=samaritan+people&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiv0ZaC8faBAxXpwAIHHaa4DYIQ0pQJegQICxAB&biw=1127&bih=732&dpr=2
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Question to those who have researched this: how true is it that Israel helped create Hamas? The general idea being that the Israeli government provided substantial resources to baby Hamas to act as a counterweight to the PLO. Which I want to put in my quiver of "governments being too clever for their own good," but the popular sources I've seen for mostly just repeat the story without sourcing it.
https://archive.ph/6mQ4Z
Long article, but the meat of it is that Israel allowed Islamist groups in Gaza, which had been repressed under the Egyptian government, to grow in influence after the six-day war, opting to focus on secular groups like the PLO. The precursor to Hamas, Mujama al-Islamiya, was officially recognized by Israel. The Israelis stood by and watched while the Islamists fought the secularists for power in the early 80s, but they didn't actively support them. HAMAS officially formed in 1987 during the first intifada, started carrying out attacks, and the Israelis finally realized that they were dealing with a serious threat, while the PLO moved towards diplomacy.
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No one actually knows anything about this stuff. It's all just conjecture. Healthy skepticism would seem like the default mode.
But even if Israeli did provide clandestine resources to Hamas 35 years ago, how does that relate to today?
Overall, the idea that Israel is responsible for Hamas would be similar to the idea that the Winklevoss twins created Facebook.
This is quite a take.
In any case, we know that half that time ago Israel refused Fatah's request for support against the takeover of Gaza by Hamas.
You know, I like this situation for how it exposes the vileness of people. The US sometimes deposes hostile leaders in its growing sphere of influence, and is content to leave sycophants in charge; charitably, it even has some compunctions to have those sycophants not be utterly psychopathic. Israel, however, plays by a harsher rulebook: it encourages the whole opposing people to fall into extremism, to then be justified in their dehumanization. And what do we get? Buck-broken power worshippers nodding approvingly: «civilization is entitled to remove barbarism».
Some light unto the nations. Gamma rays probably.
Is it vile to refuse help to your sworn enemy? Assuming they did help, would the world recognize, and palestinians be grateful for their generosity?
Which sworn enemy?
Fatah?
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This is purely of historical interest: it has pretty much no bearing on what Israel, Hamas, or their international allies can or should do (aside from encouraging a general rejection of clever clandestine activities). My main complaint about the sources I had found is because they were primarily interested in scoring points against Israel, so I approach it with skepticism but still do care about the history (and do enjoy keeping a collection of government fuckups).
I honestly think you can just ignore it. People still talk about rumored CIA activity in Iran and Congo in the 1950s as the reason those countries still suck today. It's nuclear grade cope and not worth considering.
If Kermit Roosevelt can take a suitcase full of cash into Iran in the 1950s and force them to overthrow their democratic leader (not actually democratic by the way, but whatever), what does that say about Iranians? Why are they so weak? Why don't they have any agency at all? It's all so stupid. The people who would blame the current situation on trivial (or even non-existent) events that happened decades ago are in fantasy land and should be treated as such.
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If someone is using civilians as human shields (or they volunteered to be ones) is it okay to blow them up according to current conventions?
According to HRW, no:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/09/questions-and-answers-october-2023-hostilities-between-israel-and-palestinian-armed#Five
That may be the conclusion HRW wants you to have, but it's not the conclusion born from HRW itself, which expounds on some of the key points in what you quoted.
To start, taking into account the risk to civilians does not mean not letting harm befall civilians as a direct result of your actions. To quote-
This is what more or less damns Gaza from a Geneva convention laws-of-war prospect. Because Hamas has extremely well established practices of conducting military activities out of civilian objects, and has been running them as the civil authority, the dual-use nature of many Hamas locations doesn't preclude them from being valid military objectives, because dual-use infrastructure that provides an effective contribution to the military action, such that their destruction, capture, or neutralization offers a definite military objective, are categorically legitimate military objectives no matter how many civilians are there. The Geneva convention rules of wars are categorical, not metric- there is no 'if you affect this many civilians, you automatically are illegal' standard.
Further, of the three categories- destruction, capture, and neutralization- you aren't obliged to pursue one over the other, especially if it's beyond your capacity. In the Gaza Strip in particular, where direct capture would be immensly difficult or even impossible, destruction (bombing) or neutralization (power networks) are valid means to target military objectives... which goes back to if they are military objectives, which goes to the presence of providing an effective contribution to the opposing party's miltiary actions. It's a qualify-in system based on threat activities, not a qualify-out system based on civilian proximity.
Which brings in the point of proportionality, which does limit attacks against valid military objectives. Despite how it's often used, proportionality doesn't relate to a 'fair' fight, or by being proportional to the other side's capabilities, or even the size of the weapon itself. To quote again-
Which comes down to the person who judges what 'excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the attack' is. Since most military attacks in this context have previous obvious military utility- or else the human shield users wouldn't be bothering to put human shields around them- proportionality has far more to do with 'what tool you use,' in a 'don't go bigger than you need to sense,' than 'would you have an advantage,' which was already addressed at the 'are they making an effective contribution to military action' premise and can be as easy to justify as 'the advantage is the increased survival of our forces.' Proportionality in practice is about what effect you actually need to do that, i.e. how much damage do you need to do along the way.
If you can reliably kill a target with a smaller measure, excessive would be using a needlessly bigger option. However, this depends on you actually having the means to do so. Using dumb artillery instead of precision munitions would be excessive if you have the precision munitions to use, since the dumb munitions can be expected to cause incidental loss of life/damage that would be avoidable from the same advantage by a different means. However, using artillery instead of, say, a squad of snipers would not necessarily be excessive, since the advantage anticipated from the artillery could be considerably more than the advantage anticipated from the snipers when things like survival of the force are considered.
This comes to questioning the advantage incurred... but the conventions consistently leave this to the parties involved, based on what they (think they) know at the time. The more legalistic followers will tend to have things like ROE checklists for engaging certain targets, which they use to point at after the fact, but there's no actual prescribed process.
To bring this back to the question of 'if someone is using human shields,' it would depend on what they are using human shields for, and if you had a reliable means for getting the same advantage by a means less likely to kill them, but the answer by the caveats and exceptions conceeded by HRW is a easily-justifiable 'yes.'
If the human-shield user is making an effective contribution to the military action, to the point that their destruction would offer a definite military advantage, then they cease to be civilian objects and become military objectives.
Attacking military objectives is limited by the principle of proportionality.
Proportionality is scoped by the military advantage incurred by engaging the target.
The advantage engaged by the party is determined by the perspective and judgement of the engaging party.
The party's judgement would be based on what the human-shield user is actually doing, and the expected result.
Excessive comes into play when the expected results are contrasted with the benefit and the alternative means to get it.
If there's no other way to neutralize the valid military objective, but doing so would garner a concrete advantage, the human shields are not a legal obstacle to taking out the group to get the military objective they're surrounding.
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Wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_shield_(law)
TL;DR - human shields don't get to automatically nullify any plans to strike a target, but the attacker must still take care to ensure they only strike within proportion.
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Senior Breitbart editor wants to "temporarily" move palestinians from Gaza to US. https://twitter.com/joelpollak/status/1712981078066213017
Hard to tell whether or not he’s concern trolling the Keith Woods1 type dissident rightists who have gone all-in on bleeding heart “isn’t this terrible” kvetching about Palestinians being bombed over the last few days. Sympathy with Palestinians won’t save Gaza from Israel, but it will boost the entire nonprofit NGO world of third-worldist sympathy organizations that ultimate encourage mass migration from the Islamic world to the West. The more sympathyposting they do, the more dead Gazan civilians they share, the more Western publics sympathize with migrants from the Islamic world.
And it’s not like anti-Zionism would end mass immigration to the West either when current flows are increasingly from everywhere where young men don’t have many opportunities in the developing world (particularly sub-Saharan Africa), most of which isn’t Israel’s fault.
That said…
Biden is getting so desperate at the southern border that he’s actually building Trump’s wall and desperately lobbying Central American countries to slow migrant flows behind the scenes, and now he’s going to import 2 million Arabs? Seems unlikely. This guy is getting clowned on in the comments, but more generally it’s hard to see Euro 2015 level migrant flows to the West coming from this. Mostly because the big European migrant flows weren’t on boats, though those were what was photogenic; they were overland crossings via Turkey and then the Balkans or Greece. The Gaza refugees face the rather substantial fact that Israel itself stands between them and the overland route to Europe. That means the migrants would be actively imported as refugees rather than simply show up.
Say what you will about Haitians and Guatemalans, they’re not Muslims, and Muslims in particular occupy since 9/11 a particular place in the American psyche. In 2017, Pew found 70% of Republicans (and almost 40% of Democrats!) said Islam wasn’t part of “mainstream American society”. Islam as a whole had a favorability of 48 points (ie. -2%). 41% of adults and 65% of Republicans agreed with the statement that Islam encourages violence more than other faiths. Trump’s Muslim ban was one of his most popular policies with absolute majority (almost supermajority) support.
So even if, for the discerning HBD aficionado, importing two million Palestinians might actually be preferable to two million Haitians, to the median (especially boomer and older) American they are in different universes. Obama in 2015 didn’t take many Syrian refugees for a reason (even though the president is generally recognized as having significant control over refugee intake), his stated goal was 10,000 total, and he reached this (across the entire conflict) in late 2016 (the US took like 1,500 Syrians total between 2011 and 2015 lol).
And there was a big culture war about that, too. Like 30+ GOP states announced they wouldn’t take any Syrian refugees etc. That was when it was 10,000 total, again. 2 million Muslim Gazans who voted for Hamas in the US is very unlikely, especially a year before an election.
1 I should add that in many ways I do respect Keith for at least being a real-world activist for his own country rather than a faceless internet agitator.
Lol, I’m certainly not defending Keith’s stupid views on Jews, they’re unsurprising - hardcore antisemitism is (not exclusively, of course) a particularly Irish thing even in the US, witness how many of the most hardcore American antisemitic DR types are of Irish descent. Sinn Fein were hardcore pro-Palestinian for decades, and while Woods disavows them now for supporting immigration, Irish nationalism has always been somewhat thirdworldist in character.
But yeah, there was a good meme I saw today (maybe retweeted by BAP, idk) about just how stupid this is for the dissident right. Antisemitism aside, the worst thing for anyone who wants to reduce immigration from the Islamic world to Europe is to signal boost sympathy for dispossessed or oppressed Muslims and their (many, many) causes. Whether or not the people of Gaza end up fleeing to the West, there are a billion others who might.
By contrast Jews are rare in Europe, and in 50 years almost all will either have left, have assimilated, or be in insular Chareidi communities largely uninvolved in secular affairs.
Maybe I just can’t see the water I’m swimming in but I don’t think modern Irish people are antisemitic (Keith Woods and 4chan posters excepted). The first half of the 20th century was pretty bad (like the Limerick Boycott), but since then Jews are barely talked about in Ireland because there are only like 1,000 of them. The anti-Semitic stuff I heard from Muslims and Poles in Ireland struck me as a fairly foreign thing when I first heard it.
Irish people oppose Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians for the same reason they opposed South African Apartheid: not because Jews or Boers are inherently worthy of hate but because if you squint you can sort of draw parallels with Ireland’s experience under British rule. Irish people support a Jewish leader in Ukraine because Russian actions remind them of British colonialism, they supported the Sinn Féin Rabbi when being pro-Israel meant fighting the British, they oppose the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians because it reminds them of what the British did. Everything is interpreted through the lens of our history, we’re too self-centered to be anti-Semites.
I completely agree that very very few modern Irish people are antisemitic. It is notable how many American antisemites (and dissident rightists in general, actually) are of Irish descent, and how there was in part a kind of longstanding low level enmity between Jews and Irish in some cities for many years though. My grandfather grew up in Brooklyn when it really was Irish, Italians and Jews (primarily) and always said that while the Italians and Jews typically got along mostly amenably, the Irish and the Jews didn’t, it was just how it was. Clearly that enmity predates even the foundation of Israel, so can’t be derived from sympathy with the Palestinians in that case, and while American antisemitism was generally more pronounced among Catholics than Protestants, that described both the Irish and Italians, so can’t be it. Possibly they were competing for the same kinds of things.
This is statistics 101. In a world where there are a lot more Irish-Americans than there are anti-Semitic Americans, a sufficiently strong positive correlation between the two pretty much guarantees that both of the following apply:
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I don't think we disagree in that case. I don't know much about Irish-Americans outside of their influence back in Ireland (they were always more bitter towards the British), so I'll take your word for it.
By stereotype when I was growing up in London in the 1990's, the Irish were more likely to be anti-Semitic than the British. Overt anti-Semitism was sufficiently rare that I couldn't gauge the truth of the stereotype. On the far left there was an element of IRA-PLO solidarity, but most Irish people in both the mainland UK and Republic of Ireland despised the IRA by this point, so that can't have been the main thing. Some of it went back to the 19th century, when Disraeli opposed devolution to Ireland and Irish Catholic politicians responded by wheeling out all the usual anti-Semitic tropes. (Even in the 1860's, Disraeli's Jewish ancestry was not an issue in mainstream British politics). The piece de resistance was a speech by Daniel O'Connell comparing Disraeli to the unrepentant robber crucified alongside Jesus and speculating about their family resemblance.
Yeah I remember reading that, Disraeli's comeback was a good one: 'Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.'
Again I won't dispute personal experience with immigrant communities and maybe I'm just not seeing it myself, but Ireland is almost a different country to what it was 30 years ago so the historical picture of Irish attitudes could be completely accurate and yet not hold true today. There is definitely a very anti-semitic strain growing in the far-right in Ireland, but the people I know like that are young and picked it up from the internet.
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Today the shoe is on the other foot. After years of crying over Trump 'fascistic' takeover, 'migrants in cage', the cruelty of not taking every single African that shows up at the border etc, etc, we are now being told by the same journalists that 'actually genocide is good m'kay' when it's jews doing it.
I can't take the faux outrage the remaining rest of the time when it's not jews doing the hecking racism, and the current attitudes by the respected members of the media is a demonstration that it was always faux outrage.
Who would not? All people like Keith want is the sovereignty to behave like Israelis do in their sovereign nation, or even not as cruelly as they do.
One billion IQ move: signal boost empathy with and sympathy for oppressed Muslims exactly when Europe faces an ongoing migration crisis from North Africa and the Sahel (entirely Muslim) that has nothing to do with Gaza. This surely couldn’t backfire in any way 👍.
Israel isn’t going to change its ethnat policies because some Norwegian politician cries on TV about Gaza, but if the right starts sympathizing with Palestinians that’s only going to have a one-way effect on immigration. If they could get over their hatred of Jews, they’d realize that amplifying Israeli rhetoric about savage barbarians etc would be far more likely to turn European populations against mass immigration (“it could happen here soon enough”).
And that’s exactly what the mainstream right is doing. A handful of conspiracy theorists and racialists support Hamas because they hate Jews more than brown people, yes, but I guarantee you Fox News has as hard an editorial line as Ben Shapiro.
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I think that only enables the media to shift the blame for the 'savage barbarians' rhetoric from Israelis to the right, a very convenient framing. Showing yourself capable of seeing past ethnicity/religion, and comfortably lampooning double standards seem beneficial enough to warrant the sympathy signal boost, especially if the angle is 'natives mistreated'.
Since when has “natives mistreated” mapped to sympathy for whites, anywhere?
That's fair, I'm hoping that after some tweaks it can be made to map there.
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I don't care about Israel. Sure it's sad if some Israelis die brutally but it's not really my problem.
It does matter when my local government asks me to send money to Israel to fight their problems on their behalf.
We already did the 'fight Middle-East wars on behalf of Israel' gig and all that's got us is migrants, terrorist attacks, and more authoritarian governments suppressing right-wing political expression.
Plenty of Western leaders have called foreigners 'savages' but all that's got them is to be labelled some variation of 'nazi' aided by the media-intelligence-NGO apparatus, to be banned from media or to be criminally prosecuted.
Don't you wish you had an American President ready to label Palestine a 'shithole' country?
The only way for Western countries to stop the migrant flow is for Westerners to stop letting them in and have hard, authoritarian measures against foreigners and pro-natives. If the same people crying about Hamas right now would have stopped crying about Trump, nazis, fascism, Charlottesville, Jan 6, AfD, Golden Dawn... Maybe I'd care. Now all I can say is #OpenBordersforIsrael
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Quite a nice turn of phrase, heh.
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Nice username!
Because Breitbart is supposedly a bastion of America-first and anti-immigration right. Somehow America-first never applies to Israel.
I never said otherwise.
Weirdly, a bunch of American protestants were bamboozled into believing that they have to support Israel and enable them to rebuild the temple so Jesus can return, maybe start the rapture or something. Bizarre.
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