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?
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?
The Jews are one of the groups closest to your mentality actually based on both rhetoric and action. There is a constrain related to muslim world having its own similar solidarity and fanaticism. And where do you expect Palestinians to go as they are further ethnically cleansed and mass murdered as per your final solution? How is this better for the people involved who are mass murdered? And how would after the crimes you advocate be done, avoid things like what happened in Lebanon after mass migration of Palestinians there?
Genocide as the end of ethnic conflict is myopic way of seeing it. In actuality, genocidal empires are prone to find another group and do to them likewise. Moreover, historically one group out to genocide X leads to Z acting similiarly and you get mass murder. Such escalatory spilar reached that point to begin with because that was the favorable course. That is, if groups follow a greedy path to the extreme, you are going to get ethnic conflict. Although yeah ethnic conflict is rather plausible in non homogeneous societies with human tribalism being what it is. That is why progressive supremacists support diversity because they want to create a coalition to lord over and oppress the native people.
Of course, I would not suggest that people should be pushovers. But the Jews are not the group that are pushovers, to the contrary they benefit from others being pushovers towards their own aggression. And of course from unhinged rhetoric of non Jews in favor of Jewish extremism. Tolerance of Jewish fanaticism is the reason that Israel has escalated the situation already this far. As for the Palestinians, the Islamic fanatics of Hamas also provide no happy solutions.
The best historical solution to the conflict was to keep these two people separate in two seperate states controlled by more moderate nationalists over the current leadership.
In the current case, Israel avoiding massive warcrimes like people here advocate is the sane immediate next step. Already their rhetoric about animals, destroying gaza strip, removing water. Rather than seeking reprisals towards military targets, there is the logic of racist annihilation of the ethnic enemy.
It does show that all the rhetoric of so, so, so many here about bad nationalism, tolerance, human rights, genocide denial of 80 year old genocides being of such a moral afront, being nice, whines about racism etc, etc are just the hollow words of hypocrites who align with the most unhinged nationalism and racism of a Jewish hue and even from a political coalition of the far right that is particularly and genuine extreme in said direction.
And of course that you can get away with this rhetoric in favor of mass murder and genocide against the Palestinians without a ban is precisely because of what group you have chosen to target. It's why it would be a good thing if the kind of people who run institutions, including internet forums started to get punished for the kind of unhinged bipartisan (i.e. progressive supremacist or Israeli jewish supremacist) extremism they have been tolerating and encouraging.
People here unironically care and are more passionate in arguing about people denying past genocide involving the jews, than people promoting current genocides in favor of the Jews.
I’m not convinced that it’s the genocide part that’s important. The solution is to break the will of people to continue to resist. It can be done without killing everyone, but it has to be done with exactly that goal in mind — by the time the smoke clears the very idea of attempting to start a battle with the other side should be unthinkable.
This is exactly correct, and I think it is the true aim of some of the Israeli leadership at this point. That breaking point may be very far along the line however, given the experiences of the 20th century, and I'm not convinced the Israelis have the will to go as far as they will need to.
The analogy above someone used of the war with Japan is a good one: in that case the US acted continually as if their goal was the complete subjugation of the Japanese people at any cost, if not through unconditional surrender then by annihilation. That approach works, but you have to follow it - you can't bluff at it.
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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?
The Jews are one of the groups closest to your mentality actually based on both rhetoric and action. There is a constrain related to muslim world having its own similar solidarity and fanaticism. And where do you expect Palestinians to go as they are further ethnically cleansed and mass murdered as per your final solution? How is this better for the people involved who are mass murdered? And how would after the crimes you advocate be done, avoid things like what happened in Lebanon after mass migration of Palestinians there?
Genocide as the end of ethnic conflict is myopic way of seeing it. In actuality, genocidal empires are prone to find another group and do to them likewise. Moreover, historically one group out to genocide X leads to Z acting similiarly and you get mass murder. Such escalatory spilar reached that point to begin with because that was the favorable course. That is, if groups follow a greedy path to the extreme, you are going to get ethnic conflict. Although yeah ethnic conflict is rather plausible in non homogeneous societies with human tribalism being what it is. That is why progressive supremacists support diversity because they want to create a coalition to lord over and oppress the native people.
Of course, I would not suggest that people should be pushovers. But the Jews are not the group that are pushovers, to the contrary they benefit from others being pushovers towards their own aggression. And of course from unhinged rhetoric of non Jews in favor of Jewish extremism. Tolerance of Jewish fanaticism is the reason that Israel has escalated the situation already this far. As for the Palestinians, the Islamic fanatics of Hamas also provide no happy solutions.
The best historical solution to the conflict was to keep these two people separate in two seperate states controlled by more moderate nationalists over the current leadership.
In the current case, Israel avoiding massive warcrimes like people here advocate is the sane immediate next step. Already their rhetoric about animals, destroying gaza strip, removing water. Rather than seeking reprisals towards military targets, there is the logic of racist annihilation of the ethnic enemy.
It does show that all the rhetoric of so, so, so many here about bad nationalism, tolerance, human rights, genocide denial of 80 year old genocides being of such a moral afront, being nice, whines about racism etc, etc are just the hollow words of hypocrites who align with the most unhinged nationalism and racism of a Jewish hue and even from a political coalition of the far right that is particularly and genuine extreme in said direction.
And of course that you can get away with this rhetoric in favor of mass murder and genocide against the Palestinians without a ban is precisely because of what group you have chosen to target. It's why it would be a good thing if the kind of people who run institutions, including internet forums started to get punished for the kind of unhinged bipartisan (i.e. progressive supremacist or Israeli jewish supremacist) extremism they have been tolerating and encouraging.
People here unironically care and are more passionate in arguing about people denying past genocide involving the jews, than people promoting current genocides in favor of the Jews.
I’m not convinced that it’s the genocide part that’s important. The solution is to break the will of people to continue to resist. It can be done without killing everyone, but it has to be done with exactly that goal in mind — by the time the smoke clears the very idea of attempting to start a battle with the other side should be unthinkable.
This is exactly correct, and I think it is the true aim of some of the Israeli leadership at this point. That breaking point may be very far along the line however, given the experiences of the 20th century, and I'm not convinced the Israelis have the will to go as far as they will need to.
The analogy above someone used of the war with Japan is a good one: in that case the US acted continually as if their goal was the complete subjugation of the Japanese people at any cost, if not through unconditional surrender then by annihilation. That approach works, but you have to follow it - you can't bluff at it.
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