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've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
One of the most edifying experiences of my youth was an academic assignment in the GWOT era, when we were instructed to pick a terrorist group and study its formation and evolution. I knew everyone else would pick something Islamic, so I decided to pick something else to stand out, and I settled on Sri Lanka. For about 33 years (1976 to 2009), Sri Lanka saw a brutal civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, where the two sides could be neatly demarcated into separate ethnicities, separate religions, and separate languages - not dissimilar to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Tamils were represented by the LTTE, which was a terrorist organization and a separatist group seeking to carve out an ethnostate from Tamil-dominated regions of the country. But the LTTE was also a remarkably sophisticated pseudo-state; most terrorist organizations don't have their own navy, air force, or intelligence apparatus, which are all things that the LTTE put together during their war against the Sri Lankan state.
I won't rehash the disputes and grievances of the war, since they are predictable and your imagination can reliably fill in the details from what you know of other ethnic conflicts, including the one in Israel. All race wars are eventually the same. Long story short is that tens of thousands of people died on both sides, and numerous foreign actors including the US, Norway, India, the EU, and the UN tried to intervene and broker a peace, and the conflict settled into a cycle of atrocities->diplomacy->ceasefires->new atrocities->new diplomacy->new ceasefires, on and on. And then in late 2006, the Sri Lankan government essentially said "fuck this", and decided to wage concentrated, merciless, full-throated war against the Tamils. They brought out the kinds of heavy weapons that you usually reserve for wars against foreign states, and they used them without hesitation, and with very little regard for civilian-combatant distinctions. They killed and killed and killed until the LTTE was begging for a ceasefire, which they ignored, and then kept killing until the LTTE was ground into the dirt, their leadership massacred, their leaderships' families massacred, everything destroyed - until the LTTE had no capacity to fight or do anything anymore, at which point the Sri Lankans declared victory, and the war was over.
None of this was "legal" or "ethical" or "moral". Countless crimes against humanity were committed. But the war was over, and has shown no signs of returning in the almost 15 years since its conclusion. No more bombs in public places, no more midnight massacres on farms and villages, no more burning streets. What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer. But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem. We used to know these things - all the population transfers and ethnic cleaning that took place after World War I and World War II were done with the understanding that you cannot expect certain groups to coexist in the same space peacefully for long, and that an atrocity in the present may prevent a greater atrocity in the future. We pretend to know better now, and to what end? To keep money flowing to NGOs, and hand out peace prizes to each other?
Part of what I think makes Palestine different is that they have hundreds of millions of other Arabs and other muslims supporting them. Once the Tamils were broken, they were broken- they had no path to recovery. But for Palestine, every single member of Hamas could suffer from heart attacks and die tomorrow, and all the weapons could be confiscated, but I don’t think the conflict would be permanently over. Because other groups who want to see Israel ended and Palestine established would work to recreate Hamas or a similar group, providing funding and weapons.
This feels 10-30 years dated. I don’t get the sense anyone besides a few poors give a shit about Israel in the Middle East now.
Iran and Saudis probably have a few who care but not a majority. Iran cares because a Saudi plus Israel partnership is extremely strong as a regional hegemon. And getting Israel to overreact might cause some issues for the Saudis. Those who care in Saudi society can probably ignored it so long as there are too many dead Palestinians.
I think you underestimate the amount of grass roots support for Palestine. Look at all the protests in Western countries in support of Palestine, before Israel even launched a counter-offensive. A lot of Muslims want to see a free Palestine and want to effectively remove Israel.
Part of what I think makes Palestine different is that they have hundreds of millions of other Arabs and other muslims supporting them. Once the Tamils were broken, they were broken- they had no path to recovery.
What about 70 million Indian Tamils, why didn't they support the LTTE?
Local Indian Tamil politicians occasionally campaigned on their behalf, and India even armed them in the 80s. It was India intervening as a peacekeeping force later that made the LTTE turn against them, culminating in the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, at which point the LTTE found itself pretty much friendless, with even their coethnics largely unwilling to touch them with a ten foot pole.
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Notes -
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
One of the most edifying experiences of my youth was an academic assignment in the GWOT era, when we were instructed to pick a terrorist group and study its formation and evolution. I knew everyone else would pick something Islamic, so I decided to pick something else to stand out, and I settled on Sri Lanka. For about 33 years (1976 to 2009), Sri Lanka saw a brutal civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, where the two sides could be neatly demarcated into separate ethnicities, separate religions, and separate languages - not dissimilar to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Tamils were represented by the LTTE, which was a terrorist organization and a separatist group seeking to carve out an ethnostate from Tamil-dominated regions of the country. But the LTTE was also a remarkably sophisticated pseudo-state; most terrorist organizations don't have their own navy, air force, or intelligence apparatus, which are all things that the LTTE put together during their war against the Sri Lankan state.
I won't rehash the disputes and grievances of the war, since they are predictable and your imagination can reliably fill in the details from what you know of other ethnic conflicts, including the one in Israel. All race wars are eventually the same. Long story short is that tens of thousands of people died on both sides, and numerous foreign actors including the US, Norway, India, the EU, and the UN tried to intervene and broker a peace, and the conflict settled into a cycle of atrocities->diplomacy->ceasefires->new atrocities->new diplomacy->new ceasefires, on and on. And then in late 2006, the Sri Lankan government essentially said "fuck this", and decided to wage concentrated, merciless, full-throated war against the Tamils. They brought out the kinds of heavy weapons that you usually reserve for wars against foreign states, and they used them without hesitation, and with very little regard for civilian-combatant distinctions. They killed and killed and killed until the LTTE was begging for a ceasefire, which they ignored, and then kept killing until the LTTE was ground into the dirt, their leadership massacred, their leaderships' families massacred, everything destroyed - until the LTTE had no capacity to fight or do anything anymore, at which point the Sri Lankans declared victory, and the war was over.
None of this was "legal" or "ethical" or "moral". Countless crimes against humanity were committed. But the war was over, and has shown no signs of returning in the almost 15 years since its conclusion. No more bombs in public places, no more midnight massacres on farms and villages, no more burning streets. What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer. But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem. We used to know these things - all the population transfers and ethnic cleaning that took place after World War I and World War II were done with the understanding that you cannot expect certain groups to coexist in the same space peacefully for long, and that an atrocity in the present may prevent a greater atrocity in the future. We pretend to know better now, and to what end? To keep money flowing to NGOs, and hand out peace prizes to each other?
Part of what I think makes Palestine different is that they have hundreds of millions of other Arabs and other muslims supporting them. Once the Tamils were broken, they were broken- they had no path to recovery. But for Palestine, every single member of Hamas could suffer from heart attacks and die tomorrow, and all the weapons could be confiscated, but I don’t think the conflict would be permanently over. Because other groups who want to see Israel ended and Palestine established would work to recreate Hamas or a similar group, providing funding and weapons.
This feels 10-30 years dated. I don’t get the sense anyone besides a few poors give a shit about Israel in the Middle East now.
Iran and Saudis probably have a few who care but not a majority. Iran cares because a Saudi plus Israel partnership is extremely strong as a regional hegemon. And getting Israel to overreact might cause some issues for the Saudis. Those who care in Saudi society can probably ignored it so long as there are too many dead Palestinians.
I think you underestimate the amount of grass roots support for Palestine. Look at all the protests in Western countries in support of Palestine, before Israel even launched a counter-offensive. A lot of Muslims want to see a free Palestine and want to effectively remove Israel.
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What about 70 million Indian Tamils, why didn't they support the LTTE?
Some support was certainly present.
Local Indian Tamil politicians occasionally campaigned on their behalf, and India even armed them in the 80s. It was India intervening as a peacekeeping force later that made the LTTE turn against them, culminating in the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, at which point the LTTE found itself pretty much friendless, with even their coethnics largely unwilling to touch them with a ten foot pole.
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