naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
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.
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
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2rafa 6mo 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Half of the population is <18. Go figure.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?)
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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