naraburns nihil supernum
2yr 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?
If they managed to find some countries that were willing to take in millions of Palestinians, the Israelis maybe would be able to pull off a soft ethnic cleansing. But they could not pull off a murderous, "kill everybody" genocide without alienating a very large fraction of their current supporters, including Jewish ones. Israel would become similar to what North Korea is today. It would probably not collapse, but it would have big difficulties in retaining nearly as many high-skilled, intelligent people as it has now unless it made it illegal for them to leave the country, and it would have bigger difficulties in convincing Jews from elsewhere to move there than it does now. Only the most hardcore patriots would want to live in an armed camp that is known for having recently committed one of modern history's biggest genocides, and I doubt that the overlap between such hardcore patriots and the kind of high-skilled, intelligent people who are the bedrock of any sophisticated modern economy is very large. Which is not to say that there are no intelligent pro-genocide people, of course. There are plenty. But they are an exception. In the heat of the moment after having had your nation attacked, almost anyone could feel genocidal desire. I think it's likely that a huge number of otherwise compassionate Israelis feel that way right now, for example. But there's a difference between feeling it every now and then and actually being ok with your military doing it and seeing the videos of what it looks like. Even the Nazis tried to keep the Holocaust a secret from both Germans and people in other countries, but in today's world there would be no way to keep a violent genocide of Palestinians a secret.
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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?
If they managed to find some countries that were willing to take in millions of Palestinians, the Israelis maybe would be able to pull off a soft ethnic cleansing. But they could not pull off a murderous, "kill everybody" genocide without alienating a very large fraction of their current supporters, including Jewish ones. Israel would become similar to what North Korea is today. It would probably not collapse, but it would have big difficulties in retaining nearly as many high-skilled, intelligent people as it has now unless it made it illegal for them to leave the country, and it would have bigger difficulties in convincing Jews from elsewhere to move there than it does now. Only the most hardcore patriots would want to live in an armed camp that is known for having recently committed one of modern history's biggest genocides, and I doubt that the overlap between such hardcore patriots and the kind of high-skilled, intelligent people who are the bedrock of any sophisticated modern economy is very large. Which is not to say that there are no intelligent pro-genocide people, of course. There are plenty. But they are an exception. In the heat of the moment after having had your nation attacked, almost anyone could feel genocidal desire. I think it's likely that a huge number of otherwise compassionate Israelis feel that way right now, for example. But there's a difference between feeling it every now and then and actually being ok with your military doing it and seeing the videos of what it looks like. Even the Nazis tried to keep the Holocaust a secret from both Germans and people in other countries, but in today's world there would be no way to keep a violent genocide of Palestinians a secret.
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