naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
I find the position that I am reflexively most inclined to subscribe to here to be woefully underrepresented in the discourse: neither side is in the wrong. If a village of hunter-gatherers hunts some elephants, and then the remnant elephant herd tramples the village, goring women and children in the process, would you say that either the hunters or the elephants are wrong and evil? Both sides are just doing what they must to survive (and retain the hope to thrive). If anyone is to blame at all, it's whoever put them in this position where they have no other choice to begin with - but even that responsibility seems to largely lie with diffuse, impersonal and/or simply long-gone forces.
But hunter-gatherers are primitive and elephants are animals. From noble man I expect more.
That Hamas murdered civilians on the music festival and paraded a half naked dead women around really moves the needle on my moral compass.
BUT, this is also a false dichotomy. There are not only two sides: Beside Hamas there is the Fatah-ruled Palestinian National Authority. While there is surely a lot to criticize them for, the GDP in the West Bank is twice as high than in Gaza strip. And Israel itself has plural opinions (I think Netanyahu is done after the crisis, this was a colossal failure of government on every level.)
What is the advantage of nobility that you would expect here, say if we instead imagined a scenario between two advanced alien species with incompatible terraforming needs fighting over a planet? The only one I can think of is that the noble/sentient/advanced combatants are supposed to be able to arrive upon a mutually-acceptable compromise rather than continuing negative-sum war - and here the combatants in the Middle East, taken as whole polities, strike me as more beast than man in a way that is an all too common downside of entities that are pluralistic (whether it's the democratic or the anarchic sort of pluralistic), in that they do not actually have the collective executive function to actually make credible promises.
Supposing an Israeli government entered some agreement with Palestine that involved them keeping enough land and freedom that they can expect a reasonable existence going forward, what is to stop an internal competitor who tells the Israeli people that they do not have to settle for less to upend the fragile balance of power and take over with an agenda of ignoring the agreement? Conversely, we already know how effective any Palestinian promises of bringing their own terrorists under control were, and presumably any serious attempt by Abbas to crack down on or even merely deliver Hamas to the Israeli blade would just result in his own swift elimination.
West Bank vs Gaza strip
My impression is that the West Bank is also simply less squeezed: unlike Gaza, which is essentially an overpopulated open-air prison, they still have some measure of usable farmland relative to the amount of population, and Jordan might also be a more helpful neighbour than Egypt.
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Notes -
I find the position that I am reflexively most inclined to subscribe to here to be woefully underrepresented in the discourse: neither side is in the wrong. If a village of hunter-gatherers hunts some elephants, and then the remnant elephant herd tramples the village, goring women and children in the process, would you say that either the hunters or the elephants are wrong and evil? Both sides are just doing what they must to survive (and retain the hope to thrive). If anyone is to blame at all, it's whoever put them in this position where they have no other choice to begin with - but even that responsibility seems to largely lie with diffuse, impersonal and/or simply long-gone forces.
But hunter-gatherers are primitive and elephants are animals. From noble man I expect more.
That Hamas murdered civilians on the music festival and paraded a half naked dead women around really moves the needle on my moral compass.
BUT, this is also a false dichotomy. There are not only two sides: Beside Hamas there is the Fatah-ruled Palestinian National Authority. While there is surely a lot to criticize them for, the GDP in the West Bank is twice as high than in Gaza strip. And Israel itself has plural opinions (I think Netanyahu is done after the crisis, this was a colossal failure of government on every level.)
What is the advantage of nobility that you would expect here, say if we instead imagined a scenario between two advanced alien species with incompatible terraforming needs fighting over a planet? The only one I can think of is that the noble/sentient/advanced combatants are supposed to be able to arrive upon a mutually-acceptable compromise rather than continuing negative-sum war - and here the combatants in the Middle East, taken as whole polities, strike me as more beast than man in a way that is an all too common downside of entities that are pluralistic (whether it's the democratic or the anarchic sort of pluralistic), in that they do not actually have the collective executive function to actually make credible promises.
Supposing an Israeli government entered some agreement with Palestine that involved them keeping enough land and freedom that they can expect a reasonable existence going forward, what is to stop an internal competitor who tells the Israeli people that they do not have to settle for less to upend the fragile balance of power and take over with an agenda of ignoring the agreement? Conversely, we already know how effective any Palestinian promises of bringing their own terrorists under control were, and presumably any serious attempt by Abbas to crack down on or even merely deliver Hamas to the Israeli blade would just result in his own swift elimination.
My impression is that the West Bank is also simply less squeezed: unlike Gaza, which is essentially an overpopulated open-air prison, they still have some measure of usable farmland relative to the amount of population, and Jordan might also be a more helpful neighbour than Egypt.
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