naraburns nihil supernum
1yr 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.
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.
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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.
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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