naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
(text post)
28918 thread views
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.
Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks? I'm not talking Biden type people on the Left, but DSA type leftists who support "The Squad". They are more or less saying that Israel deserved this. I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis. Yet these people are more or less saying Israel deserved this and the real victims of this will be Palestine.
I don't think this is a strawman either. If you go on reddit or Twitter you will see this sentiment. I guess this is the inevitable outcome of the oppressor/oppressed decolonize framework so many of them have adopted. This is pretty blackpilling for me because I would have thought an action like this could shake them out of their biased worldview, but this has actually seemed to do the opposite and make them hate Israel more. It's also pretty unfortunate we have to share a country with these kinds of people and they can vote. I'm not saying you need to love Israel and can't be critical of it, but what happened is to me pretty obviously evil and barbaric, and a lot of people are making excuses for it.
I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis. Yet these people are more or less saying Israel deserved this and the real victims of this will be Palestine.
Israel does deserve it. They started it, which despite what legions of corrupt teachers have tried to say to the contrary, actually matters a lot. As of writing and last checking Israeli dead 700-1,000 / Palestinian dead 900. And that's just recently. By objective measure Israelis have killed more Palestinian women & children (tm) than vice versa. Soon the Gazan dead will eclipse the Israelis without argument and there is sure to be some hot young Wonderful Women in the bundle to boot. I'm mildly and darkly curious how the narrative will 180 when that happens. I don't know what's going through the heads of vaguely self aware people when they resort to counting bodies for sob story moral victory points.
I guess this is the inevitable outcome of the oppressor/oppressed decolonize framework so many of them have adopted.
Okay, I don't know quite where to start with this. This looks like the spectre of the warmed over "Cultural Marxism" myth/conspiracy theory. Certain reactionary conservative types can't seem to let this meme go. Not only is it wrong (that's not what Marxism is and the dastardly Frankfurt School did not even the concept of oppressors), it doesn't make sense. This idea is ridiculously simple and generic yet some people keep speaking of it like they've discovered some secret.
Is Lord of the Rings a Marxist and/or oppressor/oppressed story and liberal brain virus? Sauron is clearly an oppressor. No, it's a universal human value. What is the number one whine about the USSR? That it was mean and oppressive. Are anti-Communist Conservatives Marxist?
It makes no sense to tolerate evil if you have equal or greater power. However evil that has superior power is a problem. Aka an oppressor/oppressed dynamic. It's just common logic. If someone invaded your house to steal/rape and you have a gun whatever. If they have a gun and you don't, now the oppressed are sympathetic.
Also Israel is a colonial oppressor. That's just facts. Do the native Palestinians have power/freedom do get Israeli invaders out of their homeland and stop making them miserable? No.
Well yes, the left has gotten worse about who-whom recently, but I think most of these people would have been cheering on the great leap forwards as it happened- extreme-but-still-ultimately-mainstream lefties supported left-aligned brutality is really nothing new.
How many Right Wingers changed their worldview after the Breivik attacks? I've talked to people on here who acknowledge that he was directionally correct, and possibly even effective, though most stop short of saying it should be repeated.
I don't think one is obligated to accept a reverse Heckler's Veto on one's political beliefs. Just because I'm in the audience and a heckler is rude doesn't mean that the comedian on stage is funny; just because my fellow fans start winging batteries onto the field doesn't mean the Cowboys don't suck.
If you actually believe in your core beliefs, the unfortunate actions of your teammates should not change them.
What would they be expected to change? You can be against mass immigration and also be against murdering a bunch of young people. What Brevik did doesn't really have any impact on what I think about immigration.
I'm not surprised by the support for Palestine or even Hamas, given how much it's been a cause celebre for a while, but I'm pretty appalled by the number and profile of people cheering the specific tactics, here. The extent that the paraglider has become a specific signal while being pretty strongly tied to what was effectively a group of spree shootings, kidnappings, and rapes is a change of worldview to at least have a new symbol: it's just a change for the worse. Same for people putting "full responsibility" on Israel, or finding hope in a massacre, or what have you.
It'd be one thing if these folk just had their tail between their legs for a few days and then were right back into talking about the newest Israeli overreach -- and there's no small number of people doing that -- but this is the sort of thing that FCFromSSC's Charcoal Briquettes statement was criticizing, except to an even steeper extent.
And it's coming from a lot of people who supposedly should be much more vulnerable to social sanction than rioters or internet randos.
Yes, there were Right Wingers (or actual-fascists) people who did that post-Norway Attacks (or, more often, after the Christchurch), too. But they were both a much more constrained set and hounded out of both mainstream society and of the Right. (And generally not under their own names, because when they were doxxed they'd be rightfully excluded from their jobs). Maybe we're just on the first few days, and that will happen here as well.
Yeah, this is kind of what I was getting at. If they just stayed silent for a few days, gave a halfhearted condemnation about attacking civilian targets, and then waited for the inevitable Israeli killing of civilians in their response to start hating Israel again then I wouldn't really be shocked. But straight up endorsing terrorist attacks on women and children is a huge escalation in rhetoric.
I think the reason this is tolerated more than the same on the right is that most people just think of these people as kind of a joke. It's like in Succession when he tells his kids they aren't serious people. Someone in Harvard Law playing with these radical ideas will just end up a boring drone in corporate America. I had a friend who went to Berkeley Law and he told me that all the people that came in and had written sob stories about being refugees and how they wanted to change the world all took high paying corporate jobs that were the complete opposite of what they claimed they would do. So at the end of they day, these people really aren't going to do much. It makes sense too because to get into an elite school like that, you need to be disciplined and be a conformist. So their radicalism is conformist radicalism that is a playground where you're allowed to be a "radical" without having any consequences.
Meanwhile, the Right actually attacks real power structures. Say what you want about Jan 6 or the Trucker Protest, but they actually seriously threatened elite power structures
Not really, the lefts pathological obsession to support the perceived 'underdog' makes it easy to determine which side they will take on any given conflict. This need overwhelms their decision making to the point that young leftists will self destruct to support the perceived minority and perceive that the majority is totalitarian in nature that we see plaguing US cities today. The right don't view the world in terms of underdog/establishment dichotomy but are looking at the world in terms of stability and utility, which lends them to pro-Israeli positions as there are major US interests in the middle east and Israel is the primary launching point for these interests.
The thing that strikes me with the decolonization rhetoric is that so many people espousing it don't seem to recognize the position of intense historical privilege they live in. Yes, there's issues with 2023 society, but the vast majority of people with access to Twitter live in comfort unimaginable even 60 years ago.
The entire 'Indigenous Voice referendum' in Australia discussion has been providing so many examples of this, in which there's a ton of focus on 'English colonization bad' coupled with an unspoken assumption that the Indigenous would otherwise have been left completely unmolested by anybody else and somehow emerged as a Western Multicultural democracy via process of Wakandization by now. It makes a coherent argument difficult.
Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks? I'm not talking Biden type people on the Left, but DSA type leftists who support "The Squad".
No, this has always been their position when it comes to Israel vs. Palestine. I also remember similar people, back in 2001, suggesting or outright saying that the US brought 9/11 on themselves.
The English language really needs to deprecate phrasing that can be interpreted as either attribution of causal influence or attribution of blame. It's possible for "X's actions made Y more likely" to be obviously true in cases where "X's actions made Y morally acceptable" is obviously false. Round them both up to "true" and you may find yourself excusing atrocities; round them both down to "false" and you may find yourself ignoring ways to reduce atrocities. But how easy is it not to lump such claims together when we can barely speak about them distinguishably?
Thank you for correcting my mistaken insinuation. I was intending to point out the magazine more than the specific author, but I did just assume they'd be in sync. I should have known better than to assume that someone (relatively!) isolationist must be leftist for writing about it in a progressive magazine; unpopular politics (and standing on those principles at that time wasn't too popular) make strange bedfellows.
I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis.
You could say the exact same thing in the other direction. Women getting run over by bulldozers. Villages demolished. Spraying pesticide that drifts onto their farmland. Preventing 'dual-use' equipment like X-ray machines to be brought into the West Bank. Sabotaging the economy of the West bank by bombing power plants, constraining trade into and out of the region, restricting quantities of industrial fuel brought in... There are people downthread suggesting that the West Bank just build itself up economically like Singapore - a pretty laughable suggestion given the state of affairs on the ground:
Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Gaza dropped 23 percent between 1994 and 2016 in real dollars.
This does not happen even in communist regimes, only areas with intense political suppression. And then there's killing:
Israeli forces stationed on the Israeli side of the fences separating Gaza and Israel responded with excessive lethal force to weekly demonstrations for Palestinian rights on the Gaza side that took place for much of 2018 and 2019.[497] Snipers killed, according to OCHA, 214 Palestinian demonstrators, many of them more than one hundred meters away, and injured by live fire more than 8,000 more, including 156 whose limbs had to be amputated.[498] As a UN Commission of Inquiry put it, Israeli forces shot at “unarmed protesters, children and disabled persons, and at health workers and journalists performing their duties, knowing who they are.”
Why do you think there are so many young men who are extremely angry with Israel, to the point where they're happy to kidnap and kill Israeli civilians? Because in many real ways it is an open-air prison, where they're intensely suppressed, humiliated and occasionally shot at.
I favour doing nothing, leaving things be, benign neglect. That would be my MENA policy for the West. But I'm disturbed by all the people who are astonished by Palestinian bloodlust and concluding that they're just innately savage and backwards, without bothering to inquire into why they're so angry. And then accusing pro-Palestinian people of being biased! They've probably scrolled through some of these enormously long webpages with 865 footnotes full of stories of houses getting demolished, farmland getting seized, endless military law, torture and so on. It's very understandable why people are pro-Palestinian if they put 'Israeli atrocities' into a search engine, just as it's understandable why people are pro-Israel if they watch certain TV channels or newspapers.
that they're just innately savage and backwards, without bothering to inquire into why they're so angry.
If Arabs were not backwards, could you explain how 1.5 million Palestinians managed to lose a war against at most 500k Jews in Palestine despite the support of every neighbouring nation ?
“Backwards” is a bit of an overloaded term. The soon-to-be Israelis had a more coherent and workable plan than uncoordinated Palestinians. I don’t think that represents a difference in coordination potential.
Preventing 'dual-use' equipment like X-ray machines to be brought into the West Bank. Sabotaging the economy of the West bank by bombing power plants, constraining trade into and out of the region, restricting quantities of industrial fuel brought in...
How much of that would have happened if they had accepted their situation and had not pursued armed resistance against Israel since the mid-90s? Probably none of it. They would prefer to fight than to accept a comfortable enough middle-income existence in a crowded city state that would likely be little worse than that had by their cousins in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt or (pre/postwar) Syria. I respect that they want to fight, but then it’s harder to sympathize with what is done to prevent them killing more Israelis.
if they had accepted their situation and had not pursued armed resistance
Well if we go with 'vae victis' then morality is out the window. You can invert this too, maybe Israel shouldn't have tried settling other people's land if they didn't want to be massacred? With vae victis, there is no right and wrong, only weak and strong.
OP is talking morality, sympathy, who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Who should be favoured by third parties on moral grounds (not strategic), who should be strong and who should prevail. A whole other dimension.
Furthermore, it's somewhat ironic that Israel chooses this particular doctrine, given the existence of their state is in large part due to the restraint of the British, who didn't employ vae victis when faced with a terrorist insurgency from the much weaker Israelis. They didn't rev up the Lancasters to teach them a lesson, they held back.
The reason the British didn’t go full vae victis on the Jews is that they didn’t consider themselves to have conquered Zionists. Many British elites (including Churchill) were open Zionists and considered Jewish rule preferable to Arab rule. The UK also had a large Jewish elite, most notably several branches of the Rothschild family, who were (and are) well integrated into the public life of the ruling class, and who spent fifty or more years lobbying for Israel’s existence (and are in fact the primary reason Israel exists). Israel exists because Jews proved themselves useful to the ruling class of the world’s largest and most powerful empire (and indeed funded imperial expansion, cf Cecil Rhodes etc) in the decades in which that empire decided the fate of their ancestral homeland.
If the Gulf Arabs wanted to replicate that success with the Palestinians, they could try bribing America with $500bn of oil money (or just oil) to drop all support from Israel unless they agree to ‘48 borders or whatever. That might or might not work, but in either case, they don’t care enough about people in Gaza and the West Bank to try.
This kind of repression is not coming out of nowhere. Israel represses Gaza because if they don't, Gaza will use literally everything it can to kill Israelis.
You have to take the analysis back a step further - why does this cycle of repression and violence continue? Because Israel wants to exist and Gaza does not want Israel to exist. Without resolving that fundamental tension, letting up on the repression of Gaza does not reduce the violence, it increases it.
Israel wants to expand, into Palestine and in other directions. They do not want Gaza to exist. Hence settlements contra the internationally agreed borders (making new 'facts on the ground'), hence land confiscation... Palestine also wants to expand and wants to get rid of Israel, yet they lack the power to do so. Look at who has been expanding and who has been contracting - why should anyone feel sympathy for the growing nuclear power of $54,000 GDP per capita, vs the declining semi-recognized state <$2000 GDP per capita?
You see a bear mauling a badger and your sympathy is with the bear, who's existence is being threatened by a badger? The badger got in two or three hits while the bear was sleeping and this is international news (admittedly it is at least novel and exciting). But the bear's surely going to maul the badger even harder in response. The overall trend will remain, just as it has for the last fifty+ years.
Well, sympathy shouldn't be the basis for foreign policy. Israel has the power to inflict their will, in large part thanks to tireless US assistance. We should at least be somewhat objective with what's going on and not pretend that Israel faces any present existential threat from Palestine. The statelet facing existential threat is on the other side of the conflict.
If Hamas had agreed to those borders you might have a point. But they haven't. "From the river to the sea" is their refrain. Tel Aviv is an infringement of their claims just as much as the newest settlement is.
If there is to be peace, both sides need to come to the table and compromise. Hamas does not want to compromise. Thus, no peace.
Your argument boils down to we should take Palestine's side because they have been losing the conflict. That's silly. Sometimes the good guys win.
Your argument boils down to we should take Palestine's side because they have been losing the conflict. That's silly. Sometimes the good guys win.
Note where I say 'Sympathy shouldn't be the basis of foreign policy' and 'I favour doing nothing, leaving things be, benign neglect.'
You are the one who wants to support a strong power bullying a weak one. My position is that the strong are doing fine on their own, they don't need any help doing what they're doing. You can't repress people and then act shocked when they repress you back.
Hamas does not want to compromise.
Israel derails the farcical 'US-mediated' peace process at every opportunity. Who would compromise with people who have no intention of following through on their commitments, in a process overseen by a judge who's sleeping with one of the parties?
Ron Pundak, Israeli negotiator: "The traditional approach of the [U.S.] State Department . . . was to adopt the position of the Israeli Prime Minister. This was demonstrated most extremely during the Netanyahu government, when the American government seemed sometimes to be working for the Israeli Prime Minister, as it tried to convince (and pressure) the Palestinian side to accept Israeli offers. This American tendency was also evident during Barak's tenure.
The Israelis make insulting offers where they retain control over Palestinian water, airspace, borders and prevent the Palestinians having an army and then say 'oh well we tried, the Palestinians just aren't interested in negotiations'.
Given all this, it is not surprising that Barak's former foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was a key participant at Camp David, later told an interviewer, "If I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well.
Between the start of the Oslo peace process in September 1993 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada seven years later, Israel confiscated more than forty thousand acres of Palestinian land, built 250 miles of bypass and security roads, established thirty new settlements, and increased the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza by almost one hundred thousand, which effectively doubled that population
I'm not a Palestinian leader, how should I know? I suggest that if even Israeli leaders like Ben-Ami wouldn't have accepted the terms they were offering, then they weren't negotiating in good faith.
One must also point out that the borders are what they de facto are as a result of an offensive war launched against Israel that Israel defended and took territory. I know the right of conquest is out of favor, but the right of conquest is surely just in Israel’s case.
Can you unpack your definition of an offensive war here? I suspect it would be hard to make it in such a way that it would not also apply to situations (chiefly involving the US and Russia) in which you would bristle at the action being described as an offensive war. The overall pattern since 1945 looks to me a lot like "if the X does nothing, Y will take their land slowly and the modal American will just pretend it isn't happening; if X does something, Y will take their land quickly and the modal American will perceive them as having a just right of conquest in response to an unprovoked attack".
I think you are wrong on your assertion. The US and Russia have engaged in countless aggressive wars. They are (perhaps were) the two hegemonic powers since 1945. I don’t think the US has clean hands although as far as hegemonic powers you could do a lot worse.
Which assertion specifically? I wasn't even going for the low-hanging fruit like either of the two invading Afghanistan; the interesting cases are more of the form of Ukraine's attacks on the *NR (how long do they have to squat that area before any Ukrainian attempt to reclaim it becomes completely analogous to Palestine vs. Israel now?)
Look at who has been expanding and who has been contracting - why should anyone feel sympathy for the growing nuclear power of $54,000 GDP per capita, vs the declining semi-recognized state <$2000 GDP per capita?
What is this slave morality? Of course one should, in most cases, feel more sympathy for the successful entity compared to the failed one. If a successful heart surgeon gets killed in a home invasion by some random thug, I feel more sad than I do when some dropout welfare leech has the same happen to them. Both are horrific, both are wrong, both represent a failure of the state’s obligation to protect all its citizens from crime, but the former is a greater loss than the latter. It is a tragedy when any good art is lost, but I would rather lose a mediocre Picasso sketch than the Mona Lisa.
Why rue that a killer has been stripped of his guns? The Gazans have been locked up in their territory (they were not initially, it is very important to remember) because they already fucked around and killed a lot of innocent civilians on countless previous occasions, and therefore their land was sealed off from Israel. For all the (valid, I should say) concerns about ethnic supremacist sentiment from some Religious Zionists, the Gazans are not in their current condition because of escalating oppression by Otzma Yehudit types, but because they repeatedly killed Israeli civilians when they were allowed into Israel for work and leisure.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2rafa 7mo ago
If a successful heart surgeon gets killed in a home invasion by some random thug, I feel more sad than I do when some dropout welfare leech has the same happen to them.
Except in this case the "surgeon" has been accepting massive amounts of welfare, and is simultaneously considered to be one of the biggest and most serious intelligence threats facing the US government for quite some time. It becomes a lot easier to support the badger when the bear has been given vast sums of your money while both spying on you and manipulating your political system (referring to the existence of AIPAC rather than the Elders of Zion here, mind).
I don't feel more sympathy for the surgeon because he is more successful, but because he provides more value. Some people, on the other hand, enjoy a lot of success in ventures that provide negative value to many, and I prefer the welfare leech to them.
Worse than slave morality is lionizing the strong as the weak and rushing to help an overlord as if they were an underdog.
Anyway, I say that we shouldn't make decisions based on sympathy but on interests. If the West were coolly and dispassionately making decisions, that would be great! We wouldn't be doing anything but selling weapons to whoever had the cash to pay for them. The US would not be rushing to shower Israel with billions in (additional) defence aid, not rushing aircraft carriers into the region to prevent anyone interfering with Israel.
International relations is anarchic, there is no police. Two men are feuding over some land. One is stronger than the other and is winning. Is your immediate reaction to run over and help the strong repress the weak, having a mental breakdown at the thought of a weak loser not knowing his place and striking his betters? That's the action of a madman. Leave them to it.
If we were favouring Israel because it advanced our interests, that's fine. But that's not the case. It doesn't do us any good to anger the Arabs, who can cause many problems for us and have much more to offer. Reason dictates that we throw Israel under the bus, so we can strengthen relations with more important countries. I see your surgeon and I raise you the petrol station, the latter is more important.
I note that you're not getting stuck into Ashlael's slave morality, or OP, not when their slave morality is pro-Israel. Would you honestly prefer the US adopt master morality, slapping Israel back hard when they blow up a US spy ship and sell US secrets to China?
If we were favouring Israel because it advanced our interests, that's fine. But that's not the case. It doesn't do us any good to anger the Arabs, who can cause many problems for us and have much more to offer. Reason dictates that we throw Israel under the bus, so we can strengthen relations with more important countries. I see your surgeon and I raise you the petrol station, the latter is more important.
But it does. Who else in the area is sympathetic to western ideology and willing to house western military bases?
Israel is also one of the intellectual powerhouses in the region. Intel has a 17 billion dollar foundry there. It's become an important industrial and manufacturing area of high level technology in the world. There is huge incentive for the US/west to support Israel beyond slave morality.
Who else in the area is sympathetic to western ideology and willing to house western military bases?
Turkey? All of these countries would be way happier with the West if we weren't supporting Israel, their mortal enemy. That Israel is liberal-democratic is a problem, it makes MENA look upon liberal democracy with suspicion and seek out alternative powers to balance against the US-Israel duo.
Israel's semiconductor production is pretty puny, all things considered. Malaysia also produces a fair few microchips, so what. They're no Taiwan or South Korea.
Turkey? All of these countries would be way happier with the West if we weren't supporting Israel, their mortal enemy.
Turkey also has significant political unrest with Erdogan and is essentially an authoritarian regime. I would guess the US military would be worried about parking bases there with the human rights violations and the potential for Erdogan to attempt to seize military assets one way or another. What you/Arab nations see as a problem is what US sees as something they can easily work with. Support for Erdogan by the west would also be political suicide for any politician who would endorses such a move as to their human rights violations.
Israel's semiconductor production is pretty puny, all things considered. Malaysia also produces a fair few microchips, so what.
Maybe in terms of total chip volume, but if the Intel press release is anything to go by the loss of the Fab would put the company in an awful spot. Also, decentralization of foundries seems to be a pretty good idea in general.
The US would not be rushing to shower Israel with billions in (additional) defence aid, not rushing aircraft carriers into the region to prevent anyone interfering with Israel.
I don’t believe the US should provide any further military (or other) aid to Israel.
I see your surgeon and I raise you the petrol station, the latter is more important.
The US is now energy self-sufficient, there is no further need for Arab oil and the Europeans, Indians and Chinese can conduct their own negotiations if they want it.
Israel/Palestine conflict tends to be one where the right (apart from the explicit Nazis, of course) and at least parts of the center-left immediately smells blood in the water and starts trawling the social medias for any far-left comments that either are pro-Hamas or can be presented that way. Payback for all the accusations of racism, and so on. Of course since a lot of the far left has fried brains and a compulsive tendency for never giving an inch to any nuance vis-a-vis their ideology, these are easy to find, but it's hard to make estimations of their actual reach that way.
From what I've seen, the attack seems to have caused a strong pro-Israel reaction and put the far left into disarray, with the "Hamas was right, decolonization always requires violence" type stuff getting even internal pushback. It's the strong suggestions that rape has been happening that has pushed it over the edge. Of course a sufficiently brutal Israeli reply might again swing the discourse the other way.
I’m less concerned with the younger ones or even the Harvard stuff. Sometimes it takes some time for people to hold multiple thoughts in opposition to themselves. Many find it difficult to have compassion for Palestines and then condemn them the next day.
Personally, I think Twitter is crushing it right now and this is basically true
I see plenty of takes on twitter about how the “all these bad things now” but I think it’s refreshing that even those I disagree with have a voice. And atleast for domestic US politics the lefties saying Israel deserved it will only help the causes I care about as it turns off normies.
One of the things I’ve changed my mind on the most is Trumps Wall. And I think it’s quickly becoming extremely probable. These attacks just further reinforce my belief that the west needs to get pickier with who they let in. So hopefully not just a wall but better enforcement and maybe getting rid of birth-right citizenship.
Hopefully the right stays pro-Israel and the Jews will start to vote red. I didn’t realize that the American Jewish population and Israeli Jewish population were so close in size and combined such a large portion of the total Jewish population. If the American right abandoned Israel it would face an legitimate risks of extinction as an ethnicity.
Not to mention an ethnostate where people are from somewhere (have a background, culture, familial relations) just doesn’t fit with globohomo ideology
Given a sufficiently high level of initial sympathy, “look what atrocities they’re committing” turns into “how far must have they been pushed to commit such horrible atrocities?”.
Which is why you don’t make decisions based on feeling. That’s the issue here. You have sympathy, but it’s turned off your brain, to the point that you can justify horrible things because the people who did it are the “oppressed”.
On the other hand, there does exist what I feel is a general demand, in these discussions and elsewhere, for people who have previously had a pro-Palestine stance (generally based on opinions like "occupations are bad" and "Palestinians deserve civil rights like all other nations) to drop that stance and reverse at once based on, essentially, the strong feelings aroused by clips of civilians getting killed and women's bodies paraded around on cars.
What percentage of people do you think would agree with both "decades of harsh occupation and blockade are awful" and "decades of harsh occupation and blockade do not justify terror bombing or massacres of civilians"? I'd think that those would both be supermajority positions, but it certainly seems that the people who speak most loudly about the problem tend to drop one claim or the other.
the strong feelings aroused by clips of civilians getting killed and women's bodies paraded around on cars
Inducing strong feelings is the whole reason why the murderers are performing the killing and the parading while filming clips of it, right? Nobody was thinking "we'd love to capture one more APC, but we can't spare the soldiers because the bomb shelters and music festival are more strategically significant military targets". If they're mispredicting exactly which strong feelings are induced, that's at least partly on them, though it's still tragic that innocent Palestinians will suffer for it too.
A civilization that parades around naked dead corpses of young woman civilians is a civilization that doesn’t deserve civil rights. Level up from your barbarism and sure, I can get behind that. Note there are Arab states — even if not western — that deserve civil rights.
Applying civil rights to "a civilization" is a category error; the people within each civilization are the ones who deserve the civil rights.
We're not quite 20 years out from the leak of photos which "show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency" among the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which included women. The people to blame for that abuse didn't deserve all their civil rights afterward, and to its credit the US legal system generally agreed (albeit with prison sentences of months to less than a decade at most...), but it would have been wildly excessive to spread such a high level of blame around to every American in the same civilization.
Ironically, collective punishment is itself a war crime, and its classification as such is one of the things we like to think distinguishes us from barbarians. That's perhaps still more of an aspiration than an accomplishment at this point, but so much the worse for our "civilization".
But that’s my point. Abu Ghraib was a shame to the US (and clearly the soldiers intended to keep it quiet). Here, the Palestinians writ large are celebrating the atrocities and making them known. The different reactions demonstrate the different culture assent.
I'm still solidly "Collective punishment is bad", but I have to admit: if we could mete out omnisciently accurate individual punishment, some collectives might have a much larger fraction of punished individuals than others...
People compare Hamas to Nazis.
That's not fair.
Nazis knew killing Jews was wrong.
(...) If you do not support Israel & the Jews, you are literally worse than the Nazis.
People that have lived perhaps for 4 generations under Israeli rule are worse than Nazis?
Who could be responsible for this state of affairs?
The experiment is not perfect, we would need control groups of Palestinians strictly administered by China, France, Russia, UK, Germany, Italy, etc, to see if Israel is just particularly bad at this exercise.
Comparisons can be made with various colonies...
Tough luck for Israelis to get involved in Western-style colonization so late in the game.
That's an large and important distinction, but even here I'd point out that a "culture" isn't a homogeneous thing. You don't pose for thousands of photos of something you expect to keep secret from everybody; you do so because you can observe you're part of a subculture, large enough to control a prison with several thousand prisoners, which assents to the photo contents. Turned out the assent wasn't universal enough to stop photos from leaking, which is another point in our culture's favor, I admit. The fact that Hamas fighters don't expect to be knifed in their sleep by any lone-wolf ashamed countrymen, much less put on trial and jailed as war criminals by a majority in power, isn't a point in theirs'.
I agree, I’m presenting my best guess as to the mindset of people discussed in the OP.
The key point is that worldviews tend to become self-reinforcing. The world is sufficiently complicated that an intelligent person can almost always find a way to (unconsciously) fit an unexpected event into their worldview. And the people who aren’t sufficiently intelligent will mostly follow their leaders.
By “feelings of inferiority” we mean not only inferiority
feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum
of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness,
depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such
feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these
feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern
leftism.
Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
But the same mindset did not hate the USSR when they were strong and successful.
An easier explanation is "The enemy of my enemy's friend is my friend (defeasibly)." It's not that leftists have any particular admiration for the Palestinians, Muslims, or whatever. Instead, their opposition to Israel is because Israel is an American ally, and America is seen as the enemy by modern leftists. It's the same with Putin and Ukraine: the average leftist does not like Putin, but they dislike Ukraine, because they see it as a friend of America.
If one wanted to continue the same train of thought, which I personally don't share, they might argue that all the communists who stopped supporting Soviet Union and became anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, New Left etc. did so because Soviet Union was strong and successful.
I'm not actually sure what the exact point would be. A lot of people would have at least seen the Soviet Union as strong right to the very end. However, there was a steady drip of people from a pro-Soviet left to various anti-Soviet left positions even before that, and these were often connected to open displays of strength (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 etc.)
A lot of people would have at least seen the Soviet Union
Who ? Soviets were clearly stagnating. It was obvious when despite what looked like an advantage in launches, they fell behind, didn't even manage to send people to the moon, their economy was growing far slower, etc..
Having your satellite states break with your political program so that you have to crush them militarily doesn't look strong, it looks weak. Not as weak as open defiance would have been though.
Soviets were clearly stagnating in hindsight, but at the time? Direct comparisons were few and far between, and the people who had a chance to make them certainly seemed surprised enough.
He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
The Soviets didn't even manage to send people to the moon, but until they were at the brink of dissolution they also didn't even admit they had been trying. Walter Cronkite even bought the Soviet line, ''It turned out there had never been a race to the Moon.'' The fact that Soviet lunar lander hardware and a Saturn-V-scale launcher had ever existed was only revealed decades later, by accident.
Soviets were clearly stagnating in hindsight, but at the time? Direct comparisons were few and far between, and the people who had a chance to make them certainly seemed surprised enough.
Mainstream opinion didn't want them to stagnate, but it's usually shit and honestly, wasn't anyone who ever visited convinced of that ?
Warsaw Pact countries couldn't even provide cars to people who wanted them, couldn't keep facades of buildings looking reasonably good, couldn't provide the goods people wanted to buy.
If you compared 1970s lifestyles and prosperity in Austria vs Czechoslovakia, with both countries starting from basically the same starting line, it'd have been undeniable communism wasn't working well.
This wasn't as obvious before 1970, but after ? Famously, a demographer predicted the dissolution of USSR based mostly on health data.
Todd deduced that the Soviet Union had stagnated in the 1970s and was falling behind not only the West but its own Eastern European satellite states economically. In addition to this, low birth rates, a rising suicide rate, and worker discontent all were factors in an increasingly low level of productivity in the economy. Todd also predicted that poorly carried-out political and economic reforms would lead to a break-up of the Soviet Union with non-Russian republics seceding.
In the case of the anarchists and the Trotskyists, this requires ignoring a lot of what they said, without a clear justification.
Maoists did support the Soviet Union until Mao didn't. They also rejected China as soon as it stopped being Maoist and while it was still far from being a superpower, suggesting that ideology really was their big motivator.
This is a convenient explanation, but one should always be skeptical of any description of their enemies that boils down to "they're jealous". It's not impossible, but you're gonna miss a lot. For all that leftists do this, it should be considered that they expect better of Western civilization. In the same vein that an adult is held to different standards vs. children, the social critic holds his society to be able to do better than this enemies.
There is obviously a debate to be had over whether their standards are perfect or not, but you do yourself a disservice if you boil your opponent's arguments down to "seethe more".
For all that leftists do this, it should be considered that they expect better of Western civilization. In the same vein that an adult is held to different standards vs. children, the social critic holds his society to be able to do better than this enemies.
People do not, in general, believe children should have all the same rights and privileges as adults. The pro-Palestinian left at the same time argues that the Palestinians deserve self-determination and a homeland and to be treated as a nation, but at the same time holds them to no standards at all. This is not "I hold my ingroup to higher standards"; you see that more often from conservatives. It's "I favor the Palestinian cause, therefore whatever they do is OK and whatever Israel does is wrong".
People do not, in general, believe children should have all the same rights and privileges as adults.
This isn't totally accurate. Freddie DeBoer argues that Israel is the more powerful of the two, so it has the moral obligation to do better and fix the situation. Palestine can't, Israel won't, or so it goes. I don't think he's lying when he says there are leftists who think like him.
Obviously, the people mentioned in the top-level comment are the ones that rile people up. The people who say that no Israeli is a civilian, that all settlers are inherently oppressors, etc. These people are largely unserious in how they approach the question, but it's worth noting that there is no incoherence in noting two things:
Israel's colonization of Palestinian land is wrong.
Hamas is an immoral organization
and focusing solely on 1. Decolonization and liberation of colonies may result is great acts of tragedy, but there is a strong case to be made that it is still better to grant people self-rule and independence.
Scott Alexander made an excellent point in that people in general weight things by their connection in a person's mind to other things. So Palestine links to decolonization links to anti-fascism, etc. So they will immediately load a frame of mind that Hamas is obviously moral to do those things, because it links to "Free Palestine". Thus the need to defend the immoral things done in the name of that freedom.
This is hardly an original or flattering take, but "leftists are people and people are irrational" is more accurate than "leftists hate the West and success"
This isn't totally accurate. Freddie DeBoer argues that Israel is the more powerful of the two, so it has the moral obligation to do better and fix the situation.
But without treating the Palestinians as second class in any way. And that basically can't be done.
and focusing solely on 1. Decolonization and liberation of colonies may result is great acts of tragedy, but there is a strong case to be made that it is still better to grant people self-rule and independence.
If you believe that "Israel's colonization of Palestinian land is wrong" and should be corrected, it follows from this that you're in favor of the state of Israel ceasing to exist and the Jews all either going someplace else or also ceasing to exist. This is obviously not something the state of Israel will ever agree to, so from their perspective, if you believe this you are just an irreconcilable enemy.
But without treating the Palestinians as second class in any way. And that basically can't be done.
Actually, that's totally possible. It means that Israel will have to accept becoming a more diverse and multicultural state as opposed to an ethnostate. Demanding that countries stop being racist ethnostates that use genetic testing to determine citizenship and surreptitiously administer contraceptives to africans isn't exactly inconsistent with leftist politics. Any sort of claim that this would constitute a genocide of the jews or even be bad for them in any way runs completely counter to leftist messaging - you're just not going to be able to convince a BLM/La Raza activist that allowing brown people into your society means destroying it as opposed to enriching it with vibrant diversity and a plurality of viewpoints. The mass rapes committed by islamic immigrants in western countries weren't enough to change their mind, so I doubt Hamas doing a small fraction of that to Israel would either.
This amounts to the state of Israel ceasing to exist and the state that remains in that place being hostile to Jews.
If you're an ethnonationalist, yes. We're talking about left wing politics here - Israel is an idea, and claiming that your genes determine your nation is explicitly verboten on the left.
Yes, but only some leftists think that means it's false (or alternately, don't care).
Serious leftists are going to probably talk about a two-state solution. No end to Israel, but it would have to roll back to some historical borders. Also, I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Israel can't do this w/o treating Palestinians as second-class.
3) Israel fights back, wins, we're back where we started.
or
3) Israel loses, Jews are expelled or killed.
Also, I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Israel can't do this w/o treating Palestinians as second-class.
If Israel's obligation to "fix the situation" derives from it being the more powerful of the two, it will have to override the wishes of the Palestinians, treating them as lesser. If they do not do that, they cannot take advantage of being more powerful.
We're not back to where we started. One of the biggest issues other nations and people have with Israel is its encroachment on and control over Palestinian land and whatnot. A two-state solution would go a long way to neutering this complaint about it. Moreover, Israel would still be a military powerhouse with backing from the US of all allies. War might be inevitable, but military gear tends to be expensive, and it's not like Israel can't innovate to use low-cost solutions either.
War leaves a sour taste in people's mouths, and "Israel is our neighbor that we hate" generates far less antagonism than "Israel is the active oppressor of our people".
If Israel's obligation to "fix the situation" derives from it being the more powerful of the two, it will have to override the wishes of the Palestinians, treating them as lesser. If they do not do that, they cannot take advantage of being more powerful.
This. When 9/11 happened, it was abundantly clear to me that the hijackers were villains, fullstop. But it bothered me more when the Bush administration used every excuse in the book afterward to justify invading not one, but two countries, though neither seemed to hold up under scrutiny. Evil people doing evil is bad and tragic, but not that weird. The alleged good-guys turning into trigger-happy invaders, though, is almost like betrayal.
Please notice that I have not expressed any opinions on Israel Vs Palestine, here. Just citing an example of the explanation for disproportionate judgment.
What is key is understanding is that there is an oppression stack that, in the view of this subset of a subset of the population dominates all other considerations. Being oppressed gains many points. Hamas has many points because they are "oppressed" because they lost a war and weren't granted favorable status for their proclivities towards murdering people who beat them in a war and graciously spared their lives.
I would hope they would update their priors on Palestine and Hamas even just a little bit or at the very least look at the situation and have better PR for a few days and pretend to have a minimum of sympathy even if they didn't change their opinion. At lot of the people they killed and captured weren't even Israelis or Jews.
I think you are, unfortunately, very naive about the human condition.
People who strongly update their priors, beliefs, and are open to admitting that they are wrong tend to not make it very far socially, in elite circles, local or international politics.
I unfortunately understand too well that's how people are when it comes to admitting they are wrong. However, I have an extremely low opinion of DSA type people and I really don't think most have sincerely held beliefs or principles so I thought they'd just react to this and at least pretend to care about Israel civilians for a few days before they go onto their new fashionable belief. And for the ones that do have that sincere belief, I thought they'd at least pretend to care and have good PR for a few days until Israel blows up a hospital with civilians in it and they can walk back their "support" and go back to hating Israel publicly. Neither of these turned out to be true though and these reactions did surprise me. That so many leftists would come out and say that Israelis civilians deserve to die and had this coming is extremely shocking to me. I will straight up admit I am not a fan of these kinds of people, but I actually expected more sympathy out of them. Maybe I am naive.
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks? I'm not talking Biden type people on the Left, but DSA type leftists who support "The Squad". They are more or less saying that Israel deserved this. I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis. Yet these people are more or less saying Israel deserved this and the real victims of this will be Palestine.
I don't think this is a strawman either. If you go on reddit or Twitter you will see this sentiment. I guess this is the inevitable outcome of the oppressor/oppressed decolonize framework so many of them have adopted. This is pretty blackpilling for me because I would have thought an action like this could shake them out of their biased worldview, but this has actually seemed to do the opposite and make them hate Israel more. It's also pretty unfortunate we have to share a country with these kinds of people and they can vote. I'm not saying you need to love Israel and can't be critical of it, but what happened is to me pretty obviously evil and barbaric, and a lot of people are making excuses for it.
Israel does deserve it. They started it, which despite what legions of corrupt teachers have tried to say to the contrary, actually matters a lot. As of writing and last checking Israeli dead 700-1,000 / Palestinian dead 900. And that's just recently. By objective measure Israelis have killed more Palestinian women & children (tm) than vice versa. Soon the Gazan dead will eclipse the Israelis without argument and there is sure to be some hot young Wonderful Women in the bundle to boot. I'm mildly and darkly curious how the narrative will 180 when that happens. I don't know what's going through the heads of vaguely self aware people when they resort to counting bodies for sob story moral victory points.
Okay, I don't know quite where to start with this. This looks like the spectre of the warmed over "Cultural Marxism" myth/conspiracy theory. Certain reactionary conservative types can't seem to let this meme go. Not only is it wrong (that's not what Marxism is and the dastardly Frankfurt School did not even the concept of oppressors), it doesn't make sense. This idea is ridiculously simple and generic yet some people keep speaking of it like they've discovered some secret.
Is Lord of the Rings a Marxist and/or oppressor/oppressed story and liberal brain virus? Sauron is clearly an oppressor. No, it's a universal human value. What is the number one whine about the USSR? That it was mean and oppressive. Are anti-Communist Conservatives Marxist?
It makes no sense to tolerate evil if you have equal or greater power. However evil that has superior power is a problem. Aka an oppressor/oppressed dynamic. It's just common logic. If someone invaded your house to steal/rape and you have a gun whatever. If they have a gun and you don't, now the oppressed are sympathetic.
Also Israel is a colonial oppressor. That's just facts. Do the native Palestinians have power/freedom do get Israeli invaders out of their homeland and stop making them miserable? No.
More options
Context Copy link
Well yes, the left has gotten worse about who-whom recently, but I think most of these people would have been cheering on the great leap forwards as it happened- extreme-but-still-ultimately-mainstream lefties supported left-aligned brutality is really nothing new.
More options
Context Copy link
How many Right Wingers changed their worldview after the Breivik attacks? I've talked to people on here who acknowledge that he was directionally correct, and possibly even effective, though most stop short of saying it should be repeated.
I don't think one is obligated to accept a reverse Heckler's Veto on one's political beliefs. Just because I'm in the audience and a heckler is rude doesn't mean that the comedian on stage is funny; just because my fellow fans start winging batteries onto the field doesn't mean the Cowboys don't suck.
If you actually believe in your core beliefs, the unfortunate actions of your teammates should not change them.
What would they be expected to change? You can be against mass immigration and also be against murdering a bunch of young people. What Brevik did doesn't really have any impact on what I think about immigration.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not surprised by the support for Palestine or even Hamas, given how much it's been a cause celebre for a while, but I'm pretty appalled by the number and profile of people cheering the specific tactics, here. The extent that the paraglider has become a specific signal while being pretty strongly tied to what was effectively a group of spree shootings, kidnappings, and rapes is a change of worldview to at least have a new symbol: it's just a change for the worse. Same for people putting "full responsibility" on Israel, or finding hope in a massacre, or what have you.
It'd be one thing if these folk just had their tail between their legs for a few days and then were right back into talking about the newest Israeli overreach -- and there's no small number of people doing that -- but this is the sort of thing that FCFromSSC's Charcoal Briquettes statement was criticizing, except to an even steeper extent.
And it's coming from a lot of people who supposedly should be much more vulnerable to social sanction than rioters or internet randos.
Yes, there were Right Wingers (or actual-fascists) people who did that post-Norway Attacks (or, more often, after the Christchurch), too. But they were both a much more constrained set and hounded out of both mainstream society and of the Right. (And generally not under their own names, because when they were doxxed they'd be rightfully excluded from their jobs). Maybe we're just on the first few days, and that will happen here as well.
But I'm not optimistic.
Yeah, this is kind of what I was getting at. If they just stayed silent for a few days, gave a halfhearted condemnation about attacking civilian targets, and then waited for the inevitable Israeli killing of civilians in their response to start hating Israel again then I wouldn't really be shocked. But straight up endorsing terrorist attacks on women and children is a huge escalation in rhetoric.
I think the reason this is tolerated more than the same on the right is that most people just think of these people as kind of a joke. It's like in Succession when he tells his kids they aren't serious people. Someone in Harvard Law playing with these radical ideas will just end up a boring drone in corporate America. I had a friend who went to Berkeley Law and he told me that all the people that came in and had written sob stories about being refugees and how they wanted to change the world all took high paying corporate jobs that were the complete opposite of what they claimed they would do. So at the end of they day, these people really aren't going to do much. It makes sense too because to get into an elite school like that, you need to be disciplined and be a conformist. So their radicalism is conformist radicalism that is a playground where you're allowed to be a "radical" without having any consequences.
Meanwhile, the Right actually attacks real power structures. Say what you want about Jan 6 or the Trucker Protest, but they actually seriously threatened elite power structures
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How many right wingers supported Breivik or his actions?
One could, in theory, support an independent Palestine without supporting Hamas or its actions. In practice, not so much (except, perhaps, for Fatah).
I don't think any right wingers support Breivik type attacks, but I also don't think any changed their stripes after he attacked.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not really, the lefts pathological obsession to support the perceived 'underdog' makes it easy to determine which side they will take on any given conflict. This need overwhelms their decision making to the point that young leftists will self destruct to support the perceived minority and perceive that the majority is totalitarian in nature that we see plaguing US cities today. The right don't view the world in terms of underdog/establishment dichotomy but are looking at the world in terms of stability and utility, which lends them to pro-Israeli positions as there are major US interests in the middle east and Israel is the primary launching point for these interests.
More options
Context Copy link
The thing that strikes me with the decolonization rhetoric is that so many people espousing it don't seem to recognize the position of intense historical privilege they live in. Yes, there's issues with 2023 society, but the vast majority of people with access to Twitter live in comfort unimaginable even 60 years ago.
The entire 'Indigenous Voice referendum' in Australia discussion has been providing so many examples of this, in which there's a ton of focus on 'English colonization bad' coupled with an unspoken assumption that the Indigenous would otherwise have been left completely unmolested by anybody else and somehow emerged as a Western Multicultural democracy via process of Wakandization by now. It makes a coherent argument difficult.
More options
Context Copy link
No, this has always been their position when it comes to Israel vs. Palestine. I also remember similar people, back in 2001, suggesting or outright saying that the US brought 9/11 on themselves.
Similar institutions, even. The Nation, October 2001, "blowback".
The English language really needs to deprecate phrasing that can be interpreted as either attribution of causal influence or attribution of blame. It's possible for "X's actions made Y more likely" to be obviously true in cases where "X's actions made Y morally acceptable" is obviously false. Round them both up to "true" and you may find yourself excusing atrocities; round them both down to "false" and you may find yourself ignoring ways to reduce atrocities. But how easy is it not to lump such claims together when we can barely speak about them distinguishably?
The author of that Nation piece, Chalmers Johnson, was a former professor of mine. He was hardly a leftist.
Thank you for correcting my mistaken insinuation. I was intending to point out the magazine more than the specific author, but I did just assume they'd be in sync. I should have known better than to assume that someone (relatively!) isolationist must be leftist for writing about it in a progressive magazine; unpopular politics (and standing on those principles at that time wasn't too popular) make strange bedfellows.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The left has always supported Palestine. not a surprise at all.
More options
Context Copy link
You could say the exact same thing in the other direction. Women getting run over by bulldozers. Villages demolished. Spraying pesticide that drifts onto their farmland. Preventing 'dual-use' equipment like X-ray machines to be brought into the West Bank. Sabotaging the economy of the West bank by bombing power plants, constraining trade into and out of the region, restricting quantities of industrial fuel brought in... There are people downthread suggesting that the West Bank just build itself up economically like Singapore - a pretty laughable suggestion given the state of affairs on the ground:
This does not happen even in communist regimes, only areas with intense political suppression. And then there's killing:
Why do you think there are so many young men who are extremely angry with Israel, to the point where they're happy to kidnap and kill Israeli civilians? Because in many real ways it is an open-air prison, where they're intensely suppressed, humiliated and occasionally shot at.
I favour doing nothing, leaving things be, benign neglect. That would be my MENA policy for the West. But I'm disturbed by all the people who are astonished by Palestinian bloodlust and concluding that they're just innately savage and backwards, without bothering to inquire into why they're so angry. And then accusing pro-Palestinian people of being biased! They've probably scrolled through some of these enormously long webpages with 865 footnotes full of stories of houses getting demolished, farmland getting seized, endless military law, torture and so on. It's very understandable why people are pro-Palestinian if they put 'Israeli atrocities' into a search engine, just as it's understandable why people are pro-Israel if they watch certain TV channels or newspapers.
If Arabs were not backwards, could you explain how 1.5 million Palestinians managed to lose a war against at most 500k Jews in Palestine despite the support of every neighbouring nation ?
Czech guns, in 1948.
Yeah, a few atrociously bad fighter aircraft, some rifles and submachine guns.
´Meanwhile they were faced by Arab countries with more weapons and about 20x+ manpower.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Money? Mobilization?
“Backwards” is a bit of an overloaded term. The soon-to-be Israelis had a more coherent and workable plan than uncoordinated Palestinians. I don’t think that represents a difference in coordination potential.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Half of the population is <18. Go figure.
More options
Context Copy link
How much of that would have happened if they had accepted their situation and had not pursued armed resistance against Israel since the mid-90s? Probably none of it. They would prefer to fight than to accept a comfortable enough middle-income existence in a crowded city state that would likely be little worse than that had by their cousins in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt or (pre/postwar) Syria. I respect that they want to fight, but then it’s harder to sympathize with what is done to prevent them killing more Israelis.
Well if we go with 'vae victis' then morality is out the window. You can invert this too, maybe Israel shouldn't have tried settling other people's land if they didn't want to be massacred? With vae victis, there is no right and wrong, only weak and strong.
OP is talking morality, sympathy, who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Who should be favoured by third parties on moral grounds (not strategic), who should be strong and who should prevail. A whole other dimension.
Furthermore, it's somewhat ironic that Israel chooses this particular doctrine, given the existence of their state is in large part due to the restraint of the British, who didn't employ vae victis when faced with a terrorist insurgency from the much weaker Israelis. They didn't rev up the Lancasters to teach them a lesson, they held back.
The reason the British didn’t go full vae victis on the Jews is that they didn’t consider themselves to have conquered Zionists. Many British elites (including Churchill) were open Zionists and considered Jewish rule preferable to Arab rule. The UK also had a large Jewish elite, most notably several branches of the Rothschild family, who were (and are) well integrated into the public life of the ruling class, and who spent fifty or more years lobbying for Israel’s existence (and are in fact the primary reason Israel exists). Israel exists because Jews proved themselves useful to the ruling class of the world’s largest and most powerful empire (and indeed funded imperial expansion, cf Cecil Rhodes etc) in the decades in which that empire decided the fate of their ancestral homeland.
If the Gulf Arabs wanted to replicate that success with the Palestinians, they could try bribing America with $500bn of oil money (or just oil) to drop all support from Israel unless they agree to ‘48 borders or whatever. That might or might not work, but in either case, they don’t care enough about people in Gaza and the West Bank to try.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This kind of repression is not coming out of nowhere. Israel represses Gaza because if they don't, Gaza will use literally everything it can to kill Israelis.
You have to take the analysis back a step further - why does this cycle of repression and violence continue? Because Israel wants to exist and Gaza does not want Israel to exist. Without resolving that fundamental tension, letting up on the repression of Gaza does not reduce the violence, it increases it.
The key here also is that Israel is not nearly as repressive in the West Bank where the Palestinian authority isn’t as radical as Hamas.
More options
Context Copy link
Israel wants to expand, into Palestine and in other directions. They do not want Gaza to exist. Hence settlements contra the internationally agreed borders (making new 'facts on the ground'), hence land confiscation... Palestine also wants to expand and wants to get rid of Israel, yet they lack the power to do so. Look at who has been expanding and who has been contracting - why should anyone feel sympathy for the growing nuclear power of $54,000 GDP per capita, vs the declining semi-recognized state <$2000 GDP per capita?
You see a bear mauling a badger and your sympathy is with the bear, who's existence is being threatened by a badger? The badger got in two or three hits while the bear was sleeping and this is international news (admittedly it is at least novel and exciting). But the bear's surely going to maul the badger even harder in response. The overall trend will remain, just as it has for the last fifty+ years.
Well, sympathy shouldn't be the basis for foreign policy. Israel has the power to inflict their will, in large part thanks to tireless US assistance. We should at least be somewhat objective with what's going on and not pretend that Israel faces any present existential threat from Palestine. The statelet facing existential threat is on the other side of the conflict.
If Hamas had agreed to those borders you might have a point. But they haven't. "From the river to the sea" is their refrain. Tel Aviv is an infringement of their claims just as much as the newest settlement is.
If there is to be peace, both sides need to come to the table and compromise. Hamas does not want to compromise. Thus, no peace.
Your argument boils down to we should take Palestine's side because they have been losing the conflict. That's silly. Sometimes the good guys win.
Note where I say 'Sympathy shouldn't be the basis of foreign policy' and 'I favour doing nothing, leaving things be, benign neglect.'
You are the one who wants to support a strong power bullying a weak one. My position is that the strong are doing fine on their own, they don't need any help doing what they're doing. You can't repress people and then act shocked when they repress you back.
Israel derails the farcical 'US-mediated' peace process at every opportunity. Who would compromise with people who have no intention of following through on their commitments, in a process overseen by a judge who's sleeping with one of the parties?
The Israelis make insulting offers where they retain control over Palestinian water, airspace, borders and prevent the Palestinians having an army and then say 'oh well we tried, the Palestinians just aren't interested in negotiations'.
What are the concessions that Israel could make that would end the conflict?
I'm not a Palestinian leader, how should I know? I suggest that if even Israeli leaders like Ben-Ami wouldn't have accepted the terms they were offering, then they weren't negotiating in good faith.
You could listen to what the Palestinians clearly and repeatedly say on the subject.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One must also point out that the borders are what they de facto are as a result of an offensive war launched against Israel that Israel defended and took territory. I know the right of conquest is out of favor, but the right of conquest is surely just in Israel’s case.
Can you unpack your definition of an offensive war here? I suspect it would be hard to make it in such a way that it would not also apply to situations (chiefly involving the US and Russia) in which you would bristle at the action being described as an offensive war. The overall pattern since 1945 looks to me a lot like "if the X does nothing, Y will take their land slowly and the modal American will just pretend it isn't happening; if X does something, Y will take their land quickly and the modal American will perceive them as having a just right of conquest in response to an unprovoked attack".
I think you are wrong on your assertion. The US and Russia have engaged in countless aggressive wars. They are (perhaps were) the two hegemonic powers since 1945. I don’t think the US has clean hands although as far as hegemonic powers you could do a lot worse.
Which assertion specifically? I wasn't even going for the low-hanging fruit like either of the two invading Afghanistan; the interesting cases are more of the form of Ukraine's attacks on the *NR (how long do they have to squat that area before any Ukrainian attempt to reclaim it becomes completely analogous to Palestine vs. Israel now?)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What is this slave morality? Of course one should, in most cases, feel more sympathy for the successful entity compared to the failed one. If a successful heart surgeon gets killed in a home invasion by some random thug, I feel more sad than I do when some dropout welfare leech has the same happen to them. Both are horrific, both are wrong, both represent a failure of the state’s obligation to protect all its citizens from crime, but the former is a greater loss than the latter. It is a tragedy when any good art is lost, but I would rather lose a mediocre Picasso sketch than the Mona Lisa.
Why rue that a killer has been stripped of his guns? The Gazans have been locked up in their territory (they were not initially, it is very important to remember) because they already fucked around and killed a lot of innocent civilians on countless previous occasions, and therefore their land was sealed off from Israel. For all the (valid, I should say) concerns about ethnic supremacist sentiment from some Religious Zionists, the Gazans are not in their current condition because of escalating oppression by Otzma Yehudit types, but because they repeatedly killed Israeli civilians when they were allowed into Israel for work and leisure.
Except in this case the "surgeon" has been accepting massive amounts of welfare, and is simultaneously considered to be one of the biggest and most serious intelligence threats facing the US government for quite some time. It becomes a lot easier to support the badger when the bear has been given vast sums of your money while both spying on you and manipulating your political system (referring to the existence of AIPAC rather than the Elders of Zion here, mind).
More options
Context Copy link
I don't feel more sympathy for the surgeon because he is more successful, but because he provides more value. Some people, on the other hand, enjoy a lot of success in ventures that provide negative value to many, and I prefer the welfare leech to them.
More options
Context Copy link
Worse than slave morality is lionizing the strong as the weak and rushing to help an overlord as if they were an underdog.
Anyway, I say that we shouldn't make decisions based on sympathy but on interests. If the West were coolly and dispassionately making decisions, that would be great! We wouldn't be doing anything but selling weapons to whoever had the cash to pay for them. The US would not be rushing to shower Israel with billions in (additional) defence aid, not rushing aircraft carriers into the region to prevent anyone interfering with Israel.
International relations is anarchic, there is no police. Two men are feuding over some land. One is stronger than the other and is winning. Is your immediate reaction to run over and help the strong repress the weak, having a mental breakdown at the thought of a weak loser not knowing his place and striking his betters? That's the action of a madman. Leave them to it.
If we were favouring Israel because it advanced our interests, that's fine. But that's not the case. It doesn't do us any good to anger the Arabs, who can cause many problems for us and have much more to offer. Reason dictates that we throw Israel under the bus, so we can strengthen relations with more important countries. I see your surgeon and I raise you the petrol station, the latter is more important.
I note that you're not getting stuck into Ashlael's slave morality, or OP, not when their slave morality is pro-Israel. Would you honestly prefer the US adopt master morality, slapping Israel back hard when they blow up a US spy ship and sell US secrets to China?
But it does. Who else in the area is sympathetic to western ideology and willing to house western military bases?
Israel is also one of the intellectual powerhouses in the region. Intel has a 17 billion dollar foundry there. It's become an important industrial and manufacturing area of high level technology in the world. There is huge incentive for the US/west to support Israel beyond slave morality.
Turkey? All of these countries would be way happier with the West if we weren't supporting Israel, their mortal enemy. That Israel is liberal-democratic is a problem, it makes MENA look upon liberal democracy with suspicion and seek out alternative powers to balance against the US-Israel duo.
Israel's semiconductor production is pretty puny, all things considered. Malaysia also produces a fair few microchips, so what. They're no Taiwan or South Korea.
Turkey also has significant political unrest with Erdogan and is essentially an authoritarian regime. I would guess the US military would be worried about parking bases there with the human rights violations and the potential for Erdogan to attempt to seize military assets one way or another. What you/Arab nations see as a problem is what US sees as something they can easily work with. Support for Erdogan by the west would also be political suicide for any politician who would endorses such a move as to their human rights violations.
Maybe in terms of total chip volume, but if the Intel press release is anything to go by the loss of the Fab would put the company in an awful spot. Also, decentralization of foundries seems to be a pretty good idea in general.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree. What’s your point?
I don’t believe the US should provide any further military (or other) aid to Israel.
The US is now energy self-sufficient, there is no further need for Arab oil and the Europeans, Indians and Chinese can conduct their own negotiations if they want it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Israel/Palestine conflict tends to be one where the right (apart from the explicit Nazis, of course) and at least parts of the center-left immediately smells blood in the water and starts trawling the social medias for any far-left comments that either are pro-Hamas or can be presented that way. Payback for all the accusations of racism, and so on. Of course since a lot of the far left has fried brains and a compulsive tendency for never giving an inch to any nuance vis-a-vis their ideology, these are easy to find, but it's hard to make estimations of their actual reach that way.
From what I've seen, the attack seems to have caused a strong pro-Israel reaction and put the far left into disarray, with the "Hamas was right, decolonization always requires violence" type stuff getting even internal pushback. It's the strong suggestions that rape has been happening that has pushed it over the edge. Of course a sufficiently brutal Israeli reply might again swing the discourse the other way.
More options
Context Copy link
I’m less concerned with the younger ones or even the Harvard stuff. Sometimes it takes some time for people to hold multiple thoughts in opposition to themselves. Many find it difficult to have compassion for Palestines and then condemn them the next day.
Personally, I think Twitter is crushing it right now and this is basically true
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1711601883893133772?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
I see plenty of takes on twitter about how the “all these bad things now” but I think it’s refreshing that even those I disagree with have a voice. And atleast for domestic US politics the lefties saying Israel deserved it will only help the causes I care about as it turns off normies.
One of the things I’ve changed my mind on the most is Trumps Wall. And I think it’s quickly becoming extremely probable. These attacks just further reinforce my belief that the west needs to get pickier with who they let in. So hopefully not just a wall but better enforcement and maybe getting rid of birth-right citizenship.
Hopefully the right stays pro-Israel and the Jews will start to vote red. I didn’t realize that the American Jewish population and Israeli Jewish population were so close in size and combined such a large portion of the total Jewish population. If the American right abandoned Israel it would face an legitimate risks of extinction as an ethnicity.
Not to mention an ethnostate where people are from somewhere (have a background, culture, familial relations) just doesn’t fit with globohomo ideology
More options
Context Copy link
Given a sufficiently high level of initial sympathy, “look what atrocities they’re committing” turns into “how far must have they been pushed to commit such horrible atrocities?”.
Which is why you don’t make decisions based on feeling. That’s the issue here. You have sympathy, but it’s turned off your brain, to the point that you can justify horrible things because the people who did it are the “oppressed”.
On the other hand, there does exist what I feel is a general demand, in these discussions and elsewhere, for people who have previously had a pro-Palestine stance (generally based on opinions like "occupations are bad" and "Palestinians deserve civil rights like all other nations) to drop that stance and reverse at once based on, essentially, the strong feelings aroused by clips of civilians getting killed and women's bodies paraded around on cars.
What percentage of people do you think would agree with both "decades of harsh occupation and blockade are awful" and "decades of harsh occupation and blockade do not justify terror bombing or massacres of civilians"? I'd think that those would both be supermajority positions, but it certainly seems that the people who speak most loudly about the problem tend to drop one claim or the other.
Inducing strong feelings is the whole reason why the murderers are performing the killing and the parading while filming clips of it, right? Nobody was thinking "we'd love to capture one more APC, but we can't spare the soldiers because the bomb shelters and music festival are more strategically significant military targets". If they're mispredicting exactly which strong feelings are induced, that's at least partly on them, though it's still tragic that innocent Palestinians will suffer for it too.
More options
Context Copy link
A civilization that parades around naked dead corpses of young woman civilians is a civilization that doesn’t deserve civil rights. Level up from your barbarism and sure, I can get behind that. Note there are Arab states — even if not western — that deserve civil rights.
Applying civil rights to "a civilization" is a category error; the people within each civilization are the ones who deserve the civil rights.
We're not quite 20 years out from the leak of photos which "show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency" among the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which included women. The people to blame for that abuse didn't deserve all their civil rights afterward, and to its credit the US legal system generally agreed (albeit with prison sentences of months to less than a decade at most...), but it would have been wildly excessive to spread such a high level of blame around to every American in the same civilization.
Ironically, collective punishment is itself a war crime, and its classification as such is one of the things we like to think distinguishes us from barbarians. That's perhaps still more of an aspiration than an accomplishment at this point, but so much the worse for our "civilization".
But that’s my point. Abu Ghraib was a shame to the US (and clearly the soldiers intended to keep it quiet). Here, the Palestinians writ large are celebrating the atrocities and making them known. The different reactions demonstrate the different culture assent.
I know I shouldn't let myself be swayed further by an argument's rhetoric than by it's logic, but Michael Shermer really found a damning framing supporting your point.
I'm still solidly "Collective punishment is bad", but I have to admit: if we could mete out omnisciently accurate individual punishment, some collectives might have a much larger fraction of punished individuals than others...
Not the great argument Shemer thinks it is.
People that have lived perhaps for 4 generations under Israeli rule are worse than Nazis? Who could be responsible for this state of affairs? The experiment is not perfect, we would need control groups of Palestinians strictly administered by China, France, Russia, UK, Germany, Italy, etc, to see if Israel is just particularly bad at this exercise. Comparisons can be made with various colonies... Tough luck for Israelis to get involved in Western-style colonization so late in the game.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's an large and important distinction, but even here I'd point out that a "culture" isn't a homogeneous thing. You don't pose for thousands of photos of something you expect to keep secret from everybody; you do so because you can observe you're part of a subculture, large enough to control a prison with several thousand prisoners, which assents to the photo contents. Turned out the assent wasn't universal enough to stop photos from leaking, which is another point in our culture's favor, I admit. The fact that Hamas fighters don't expect to be knifed in their sleep by any lone-wolf ashamed countrymen, much less put on trial and jailed as war criminals by a majority in power, isn't a point in theirs'.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree, I’m presenting my best guess as to the mindset of people discussed in the OP.
The key point is that worldviews tend to become self-reinforcing. The world is sufficiently complicated that an intelligent person can almost always find a way to (unconsciously) fit an unexpected event into their worldview. And the people who aren’t sufficiently intelligent will mostly follow their leaders.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
From Industrial Society and Its Future.
It never struck me until now but effectively Uncle Ted is saying the left has merely embraced slave morality to the point they don’t even know it.
More options
Context Copy link
But the same mindset did not hate the USSR when they were strong and successful.
An easier explanation is "The enemy of my enemy's friend is my friend (defeasibly)." It's not that leftists have any particular admiration for the Palestinians, Muslims, or whatever. Instead, their opposition to Israel is because Israel is an American ally, and America is seen as the enemy by modern leftists. It's the same with Putin and Ukraine: the average leftist does not like Putin, but they dislike Ukraine, because they see it as a friend of America.
If one wanted to continue the same train of thought, which I personally don't share, they might argue that all the communists who stopped supporting Soviet Union and became anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, New Left etc. did so because Soviet Union was strong and successful.
The greatest losses in support came when it stopped looking strong and successful (Brezhnev era) no ?
I'm not actually sure what the exact point would be. A lot of people would have at least seen the Soviet Union as strong right to the very end. However, there was a steady drip of people from a pro-Soviet left to various anti-Soviet left positions even before that, and these were often connected to open displays of strength (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 etc.)
Who ? Soviets were clearly stagnating. It was obvious when despite what looked like an advantage in launches, they fell behind, didn't even manage to send people to the moon, their economy was growing far slower, etc..
Having your satellite states break with your political program so that you have to crush them militarily doesn't look strong, it looks weak. Not as weak as open defiance would have been though.
Soviets were clearly stagnating in hindsight, but at the time? Direct comparisons were few and far between, and the people who had a chance to make them certainly seemed surprised enough.
The Soviets didn't even manage to send people to the moon, but until they were at the brink of dissolution they also didn't even admit they had been trying. Walter Cronkite even bought the Soviet line, ''It turned out there had never been a race to the Moon.'' The fact that Soviet lunar lander hardware and a Saturn-V-scale launcher had ever existed was only revealed decades later, by accident.
Mainstream opinion didn't want them to stagnate, but it's usually shit and honestly, wasn't anyone who ever visited convinced of that ?
Warsaw Pact countries couldn't even provide cars to people who wanted them, couldn't keep facades of buildings looking reasonably good, couldn't provide the goods people wanted to buy.
If you compared 1970s lifestyles and prosperity in Austria vs Czechoslovakia, with both countries starting from basically the same starting line, it'd have been undeniable communism wasn't working well.
This wasn't as obvious before 1970, but after ? Famously, a demographer predicted the dissolution of USSR based mostly on health data.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In the case of the anarchists and the Trotskyists, this requires ignoring a lot of what they said, without a clear justification.
Maoists did support the Soviet Union until Mao didn't. They also rejected China as soon as it stopped being Maoist and while it was still far from being a superpower, suggesting that ideology really was their big motivator.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a convenient explanation, but one should always be skeptical of any description of their enemies that boils down to "they're jealous". It's not impossible, but you're gonna miss a lot. For all that leftists do this, it should be considered that they expect better of Western civilization. In the same vein that an adult is held to different standards vs. children, the social critic holds his society to be able to do better than this enemies.
There is obviously a debate to be had over whether their standards are perfect or not, but you do yourself a disservice if you boil your opponent's arguments down to "seethe more".
People do not, in general, believe children should have all the same rights and privileges as adults. The pro-Palestinian left at the same time argues that the Palestinians deserve self-determination and a homeland and to be treated as a nation, but at the same time holds them to no standards at all. This is not "I hold my ingroup to higher standards"; you see that more often from conservatives. It's "I favor the Palestinian cause, therefore whatever they do is OK and whatever Israel does is wrong".
This isn't totally accurate. Freddie DeBoer argues that Israel is the more powerful of the two, so it has the moral obligation to do better and fix the situation. Palestine can't, Israel won't, or so it goes. I don't think he's lying when he says there are leftists who think like him.
Obviously, the people mentioned in the top-level comment are the ones that rile people up. The people who say that no Israeli is a civilian, that all settlers are inherently oppressors, etc. These people are largely unserious in how they approach the question, but it's worth noting that there is no incoherence in noting two things:
and focusing solely on 1. Decolonization and liberation of colonies may result is great acts of tragedy, but there is a strong case to be made that it is still better to grant people self-rule and independence.
Scott Alexander made an excellent point in that people in general weight things by their connection in a person's mind to other things. So Palestine links to decolonization links to anti-fascism, etc. So they will immediately load a frame of mind that Hamas is obviously moral to do those things, because it links to "Free Palestine". Thus the need to defend the immoral things done in the name of that freedom.
This is hardly an original or flattering take, but "leftists are people and people are irrational" is more accurate than "leftists hate the West and success"
But without treating the Palestinians as second class in any way. And that basically can't be done.
If you believe that "Israel's colonization of Palestinian land is wrong" and should be corrected, it follows from this that you're in favor of the state of Israel ceasing to exist and the Jews all either going someplace else or also ceasing to exist. This is obviously not something the state of Israel will ever agree to, so from their perspective, if you believe this you are just an irreconcilable enemy.
Actually, that's totally possible. It means that Israel will have to accept becoming a more diverse and multicultural state as opposed to an ethnostate. Demanding that countries stop being racist ethnostates that use genetic testing to determine citizenship and surreptitiously administer contraceptives to africans isn't exactly inconsistent with leftist politics. Any sort of claim that this would constitute a genocide of the jews or even be bad for them in any way runs completely counter to leftist messaging - you're just not going to be able to convince a BLM/La Raza activist that allowing brown people into your society means destroying it as opposed to enriching it with vibrant diversity and a plurality of viewpoints. The mass rapes committed by islamic immigrants in western countries weren't enough to change their mind, so I doubt Hamas doing a small fraction of that to Israel would either.
This amounts to the state of Israel ceasing to exist and the state that remains in that place being hostile to Jews.
Yes, but only some leftists think that means it's false (or alternately, don't care).
If you're an ethnonationalist, yes. We're talking about left wing politics here - Israel is an idea, and claiming that your genes determine your nation is explicitly verboten on the left.
I personally think that it would be terrible for the jews - but they explicitly advocate for sending their "undesirables" to my nation (https://www.jpost.com/diplomacy-and-politics/danny-danon-send-african-migrants-to-australia), so I don't think there's anything wrong with suggesting the same to them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Serious leftists are going to probably talk about a two-state solution. No end to Israel, but it would have to roll back to some historical borders. Also, I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Israel can't do this w/o treating Palestinians as second-class.
Two state solution goes like this:
1) Two states are set up
2) Arab state attacks Israel
3) Israel fights back, wins, we're back where we started.
or
3) Israel loses, Jews are expelled or killed.
If Israel's obligation to "fix the situation" derives from it being the more powerful of the two, it will have to override the wishes of the Palestinians, treating them as lesser. If they do not do that, they cannot take advantage of being more powerful.
We're not back to where we started. One of the biggest issues other nations and people have with Israel is its encroachment on and control over Palestinian land and whatnot. A two-state solution would go a long way to neutering this complaint about it. Moreover, Israel would still be a military powerhouse with backing from the US of all allies. War might be inevitable, but military gear tends to be expensive, and it's not like Israel can't innovate to use low-cost solutions either.
War leaves a sour taste in people's mouths, and "Israel is our neighbor that we hate" generates far less antagonism than "Israel is the active oppressor of our people".
No, I don't see how that's the case.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This. When 9/11 happened, it was abundantly clear to me that the hijackers were villains, fullstop. But it bothered me more when the Bush administration used every excuse in the book afterward to justify invading not one, but two countries, though neither seemed to hold up under scrutiny. Evil people doing evil is bad and tragic, but not that weird. The alleged good-guys turning into trigger-happy invaders, though, is almost like betrayal.
Please notice that I have not expressed any opinions on Israel Vs Palestine, here. Just citing an example of the explanation for disproportionate judgment.
The attack of Afghanistan was just. The occupation was dumb.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What is key is understanding is that there is an oppression stack that, in the view of this subset of a subset of the population dominates all other considerations. Being oppressed gains many points. Hamas has many points because they are "oppressed" because they lost a war and weren't granted favorable status for their proclivities towards murdering people who beat them in a war and graciously spared their lives.
More options
Context Copy link
No. Large portions of the left have long been openly hostile to Israel and sympathetic to the Palestinians (e.g. consider support for BDS).
More options
Context Copy link
Why are you shocked? Support for Israel is Team Red-coded in America.
American political theater is so polarized Blue team in America could ritualistically eat babies and people still wouldn't vote for Team Red.
I would hope they would update their priors on Palestine and Hamas even just a little bit or at the very least look at the situation and have better PR for a few days and pretend to have a minimum of sympathy even if they didn't change their opinion. At lot of the people they killed and captured weren't even Israelis or Jews.
I think you are, unfortunately, very naive about the human condition.
People who strongly update their priors, beliefs, and are open to admitting that they are wrong tend to not make it very far socially, in elite circles, local or international politics.
I unfortunately understand too well that's how people are when it comes to admitting they are wrong. However, I have an extremely low opinion of DSA type people and I really don't think most have sincerely held beliefs or principles so I thought they'd just react to this and at least pretend to care about Israel civilians for a few days before they go onto their new fashionable belief. And for the ones that do have that sincere belief, I thought they'd at least pretend to care and have good PR for a few days until Israel blows up a hospital with civilians in it and they can walk back their "support" and go back to hating Israel publicly. Neither of these turned out to be true though and these reactions did surprise me. That so many leftists would come out and say that Israelis civilians deserve to die and had this coming is extremely shocking to me. I will straight up admit I am not a fan of these kinds of people, but I actually expected more sympathy out of them. Maybe I am naive.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But enough about Marina Abramović.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link