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.
It is a bit lame to post a twitter link and say I agree with it, but this piece resonates with me so much that I wanted to share it here. I still believe this place is majority composed of reasonable people, notwithstanding the couple of accounts that has spent the last couple of weeks plotting genocide scenarios and reliving their war on terror "they hate us for our freedoms" high one last time.
To delve deeper into the uncomfortable topic of the looming genocide, I also increasingly get the feeling that contrary to the expectations of some whose view of geopolitics is eerily similar to RTS mechanics, the genocidal military power IDF is displaying right now is ultimately going to harm Israel a lot more than it helps. I think it mainly has to do with political/military leadership trying to cover their ass and muffle their enormous failures with the sound of bombs. If IDF really goes through with their plan which seems likely to cost civilian lives in the hundreds of thousands, I don't think the nation of Israel will ever recover from this.
It is a country that is already losing two of its most powerful weapons:
Endlessly idealistic and intelligent Ashkenazi founders who knew to out-think and out-work their opponents at very turn, and most importantly to not lose the sight of their goal even when they had to take very nasty decisions at times: to create a people. Not to destroy one. These people are not only losing out in demography but also they are losing the soul of the nation. Their spirit will not survive a Gazan genocide.
Zionist influence in the Western world. Through a combination of dedication, money, human quality, well-crafted propaganda, historical guilt and Cold War positioning, Zionists has always had a very unique power position in Western institutions, especially the US ones. This is quickly disappearing. Western Jews are assimilating into the PMC deracinated blob at a breathtaking pace. They are losing the set of assumptions that motivated them to identify with their kin in Israel, and they are losing the power that comes from ethnic favoritism. A Gazan genocide is very likely going to be the final nail in the coffin here.
I fully agree that the situation with Gaza is entirely unsustainable. But if Israelis go through with what they are plotting right now, they will slowly but surely find out that they are 7 million souls surviving in an ocean of half a billion through miracles, and they are pissing in the miracle potion.
I am of the impression that the Israeli army is preparing to kill directly or through starvation a very significant part of the Gazan population in the coming weeks. They also perhaps hope that the atrocities will be so severe that Egypt will be forced to open the border and let most of the Gazan population to leave.
Of course I might be mistaken but when I listen to the Israeli politicians and the few people I keep in contact with in the country (all of whom I would describe as reasonable people), this is the impression I get.
I actually agree with most of what he said. It's more what he hasn't said that's the problem.
Please also remember this: Hamas is still an extremist group. The Palestinian people do not have a government or leaders who legitimately represent their interests, and it sure as hell isn't Hamas.
I'm gonna say, source on this? (not necessarily to you Pasha) Hamas is the legitimately elected government of Gaza. So Mr. Isaac Saul does not believe they "legitimately represent their interests", but who is he to say? They won the last election, how does he know better? Perhaps he is personally friends with a number of reasonable Palestinians in Gaza, but there's no solid indication that they represent a majority. So why isn't it him and whoever he is friends with who do not legitimately represent the actual interests of the majority of Gaza residents? For better or worse, if they are free people, their opinions are what they actually are and what they have proven them to be, not what we would like them to be.
Israel is forever stuffing these people into tinier and tinier boxes with fewer and fewer resources.
So this is technically true, but it misses the why. They're not doing it because they're great big jerks who just wanna smash some Palestinians (or at least, they weren't before this most recent spate). They're doing it because the Gaza residents have consistently prioritized hurting Israelis any way they can over everything else. They've displayed pretty remarkable levels of cleverness in turning what we would think of as ordinary objects into weapons. If you legitimately try to stop anything that could possibly be turned into some sort of weapon from coming in, you're not left with much. What materials do you think they used to make those para-glider things to drop basically paratroopers into a music festival, and would you block all of those from going into Gaza?
Ultimately, I have no idea what to do with a people who refuse to accept any sort of peace and bend all their efforts towards destroying you no matter what you do to them. Maybe sitting on them hard enough to mostly stop them from attacking you just makes them angrier, but then exactly what are you supposed to do?
There hasn’t been any elections ever since and Hamas controls Gaza through widespread torture and executions. It’s openly acknowledged* and widely known that Israeli government (especially Netanyahu) has been more than happy and supportive of this situation since the existence of Hamas makes a two-state solution impossible and gives Israel ample opportunity for further taking over the West Bank. They thought they could handle the heat for the political gains. Turns out they couldn’t.
I am not sure if you are being disingenuous or simply ignorant when you argue Gaza electing Hamas means they are fair game. I was entering most discussions here very combatively last weekend because I thought people were plainly lying, but lately I am realising that people genuinely don’t know much about the history of the conflict and they just like to make big brain statements for the sake of it.
*one thing I really like with every Israeli I ever met is that they are very direct people. Hence you can almost always find videos of an Israeli prime minister openly describing plots which gets you branded as a conspiracy theorist when you describe them to westerners who are used to their government officials talking in absolutely empty sentences all the time.
I do know that, but I don't think it changes anything regarding what I said. They did win the last election, regardless of it being kind of a while ago and however much the Israeli government might have helped. As far as I know, Hamas didn't make any secret of what they believed when those elections were being held; everyone who voted for them must have known what they were all about. There aren't any free opinion polls there, so all we really know is that nobody has managed to successfully overthrow them yet.
I'd honestly love it if the residents of Gaza truly were 80% Jeffersonian classical liberals whose demands for peace and prosperity are not being heard solely due to the brutal oppression of Hamas - that means there is a possible peaceful solution to all this. Sadly, regardless of how much you or I would like for that to be the case, we just don't have any proof of it, and all of the indirect signs suggest it's not.
What if it truly is the case that upwards of 80% of Gazans really do hate the idea of Israel existing at all so much that they don't mind giving up things like running water to hit back at them somehow? What evidence would you accept that that's the case?
For me, a lot of this comes from the, I guess you would call it hangover or backlash from the Iraq war. We were told the same things during the runup to that. Hey, the only reason this place is a mess is because Saddam Hussein is a big fat jerk. If we just bump him off, it'll be a nice stable Democracy in a snap. The Bush admin said it. I remember reading all of the blogs saying it at the time. I probably said it to a few people myself. I wanted to believe it. Then, reality hit us all in the face. Saddam was actually keeping a lid on a lot of beefs that promptly blew up in our faces as soon as his regime was out of the picture. Through a tremendous effort in both blood and treasure by the most powerful military in the world, we eventually managed to get it sort of kind of under control. At least until ISIS gobbled up a good chunk of it. But let's not get too far into recent Middle East happenings. Bottom line is that it is a nice and seductive idea that there's all a bunch of nice kind peaceful people in these places who are being oppressed by a minority of nutcases, but it's just not the case. We've had our faces rubbed into it good and hard by now.
I think often of this old-ish, since deleted article I read a while back during the Iraq war and Arab Spring. A Western blogger / journalist meets an Egyptian political blogger for a little tour of Cairo and a few conversations. In one, he asks this Egyptian guy, a classical liberal there, "How many people here think like you do?". The answer was "Few, very few. Less than ten percent probably." Also note how the Taliban took over Afghanistan about 20 minutes after the US Military left. The way I see it, it's just a fact that a majority of people in that region really do think this way. Nothing we try to do in the region will work right if we continue to refuse to accept this even when it's staring us in the face.
“You cannot keep two million people living in the conditions people in Gaza are living in and expect peace.”
This is entirely correct. It glosses over the fact that “the conditions people in Gaza are living in” is the result of their chosen policies - namely, putting resources into Jew-killing efforts rather than nation-building efforts - but it’s still entirely true.
Given that those people cannot be allowed into Israel, and that they don’t show any signs of trying to improve their own living conditions, the only way out of this situation is for them to simply be somewhere else. Preferably they could go to many different somewhere elses, such that their culture could be diluted in their hosts’ culture until finally it disappears.
This is entirely correct. It glosses over the fact that “the conditions people in Gaza are living in” is the result of their chosen policies - namely, putting resources into Jew-killing efforts rather than nation-building efforts - but it’s still entirely true.
A result of Hamas' policies. I guess you can say that voting for Hamas once and having them defenestrate any opposition and rule via pure violence makes them culpable but I think it's a dubious argument - especially given how young Gaza. If people voted for Saddam once I doubt starving Iraqis would be seen as a matter of putting the moral responsibility where it belongs. You can claim it's a military or political necessity but the conscience-soothing explanation doesn't seem sufficient.
This is entirely correct. It glosses over the fact that “the conditions people in Gaza are living in” is the result of their chosen policies - namely, putting resources into Jew-killing efforts rather than nation-building efforts - but it’s still entirely true.
It's worse than mere neglect. They actively scrap basic necessities to fashion into weapons to kill jews.
The European Union helped to build more than 30 miles of water pipelines for Palestinians despite Hamas terrorists boasting of their ability to forge an arsenal of home-made rockets from pipes.
They've basically torn up all the old infrastructure the Israeli's left behind, and built rockets with them. Then have the nerve to complain that their basic necessities are so terrible. What's that saying about the definition of hutzpah? Murdering your parents and then begging the court for mercy because you are an orphan?
Israel is, yes, in a no win situation. If they punish Hamas as is appropriate, and any other state would, they will face down an increasingly hostile press and international community which will exaggerate every "civilian" death and downplay every destruction of a rocket site that is located in the middle of a mosque, school, etc as unnecessary.
Will Israel lose this long term? Probably. But it will have nothing to do with Israel's choices. They have faced a stacked deck as long as I have been alive where they are essentially banned from using their strengths, because the media considers real strength to be an evil.
I think Israel will do just fine with «if you kill your enemies, you win» logic.
As Netanyahu (easily an intellectual and moral peer to those founders) has said five years ago:
PM Netanyahu: Shimon aspired toward peace but he knew that true peace can be achieved only if our hands strongly grasp defensive weaponry. In the Middle East, and in many parts of the world, there is a simple truth: There is no place for the weak.
The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
There's only one problem with this: Israel is fairly dependent on the outside community for support. They can't afford to turn into a pariah state by ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza.
Here's the solution (if the problem ever presents itself): Diaspora members commit to obstruct hiring for "supporters of Hamas" and nobody makes Israel a pariah state. Indians are already aware of this technique.
Diaspora Jews are neither monolithic enough nor centrally coordinated enough to make this feasible. Palestinians have a nontrivial amount of support in the West which is why Israel hasn't been able to solve the problem despite decades of conflict, and this is showing no likelihood of change anytime soon.
At this point I don't know if you're joking or not.
I am not. Seeing AGP transsexual, BLM-fists, colored-hair, tear-down-patriarchy, immigrants-welcome, religion-sucks, Israel-is-a-colonial-power, Bibi-is-a-fascist Jews in my network absolutely froth at the mouths and clamor for genocide (supported by kind Christian doctors), I do not believe that the Diaspora will need any more coordination on this topic than long-standing Zionist organizations and the collective shaming of dissenters by people who've just lost their relatives (and Jews tend to be acutely aware of their distant cousins and aunts, so there are very very many Jews in mourning now), and their friends, provide. Crucially, I do not believe there is very much capacity and coordination needed to overcome lobbying of Palestinians, or even broadly Muslims.
But we shall see – both how this goes, and what it costs Israel. For now I predict that there won't be genocide (@2rafa, probably referencing the idea of "decimation", tentatively defines it as "200,000 or more Gazan casualties" and I'm inclined to agree, so – there'll be less then that), and there won't be any lasting cost in the West.
I am not. Seeing AGP transsexual, BLM-fists, colored-hair, tear-down-patriarchy, immigrants-welcome, religion-sucks, Israel-is-a-colonial-power, Bibi-is-a-fascist Jews in my network absolutely froth at the mouths and clamor for genocide…
Have to say I really haven’t seen much of this. The biggest frothers are the already hardcore Zionists, often outright conservative aligned even if never Trump. The numerical bulk, at least in my social circles, slightly less extreme, are lawyer and gym owner and dance instructor and and finance types who obviously vote Democrat and maybe had a black square on Instagram in 2020 , but they’re not blue hair AGP ‘Israel is an apartheid state’ types at all. Those mostly posted both side messages, and are now back to the regularly scheduled Palestineposting about Gazan civilians and open air prison etc.
I am not saying they are representative of their group, just that it has reached even that group; and the moral sanction for ethnic cleansing won't be as hard to procure as their usual sympathies suggest.
Diaspora Jews are neither monolithic enough nor centrally coordinated enough to make this feasible.
Except it looks that they are, the storm of doxxing, deplatforming and cancelling everyone showing the slightest sympathy to Hamas is impressive, not even non-binary persons of color are spared this time.
Palestinians have a nontrivial amount of support in the West
Not any more. Peak Palestine moment was probably the Second Intifada, around the time of "Battle of Jenin", this objectively rather minor affair was at the time headline news worldwide and treated like new Stalingrad battle.
The Palestine moment is over, expect Palestinian symbols and sympathizers to be treated like Nazi ones (no, this does not mean being celebrated by Canadian parliament).
The Harvard doxxing truck isn't evidence of much since it was condemned by most people on campus, including the Harvard Hillel. People have been giving Israel a pass due to the warcrimes of Hamas like the decapitated babies, but that'll end in a few news cycles when there's been nothing but story after story of Israel pounding Gaza.
For every story of the West being pro-Israel, there's another one saying they shouldn't go too far or that they've lost sympathy altogether. Unless we have solid data (not mere anecdotes) showing decisive long-term shifts one way or the other, we should default to assuming events will roughly follow the status quo.
I empathize with the writer, but any piece that concludes "I don't have any answers" I think loses the right to say "but this isn't the answer". There are no good options here, I think we can all acknowledge that. But there are options, and one of them must be chosen.
In my opinion the least-bad choice is the liquidation of Hamas and the ongoing occupation of Gaza to prevent a similar group arising in their place. It may or may not even be possible, and if it is possible it will cost a lot of lives. But it at least has half a chance of preventing the large scale organized terrorism Hamas perpetrates and can prevent the kind of brainwashing (like kindergarteners being made to act out terrorist operations) that makes the ongoing cycle of violence impossible to break.
"I don't have any answers" I think loses the right to say "but this isn't the answer".
Hard agree on this. What makes Israel vs Palestine so difficult isn't that it's a complicated history, since that's true of nearly every major conflict. The problem is that it's gone so far down the toxoplasmic spiral that neither side is willing to compromise, so there are only bad options. But one must be chosen as you said.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
Pasha 6mo ago
You cannot keep two million people living in the conditions people in Gaza are living in and expect peace.
What exactly is so bad about Gaza?
As far as I can tell, until the recent turmoil:
they had electricity
life expectancy was 75 years so they presumably have some reasonable healthcare
obesity rate is 20% so presumably they have enough to eat
they can't leave, but the blockade only begun in earnest after the battle of gaza in 2007. Also Egypt is also not letting them in
I wouldn't want to personally live there, but it didn't exactly seem like hell on earth and much of what's wrong with it is the result of the gazans' own actions.
life expectancy was 75 years so presumably they have some decent healthcare
Fair enough although you get a LOT of mileage out of germ theory, half-decent sanitation, vaccines, and cheap readily available antibiotics. Obstetrics makes a difference too. If you combine that with half-decent nutrition you no shit have most of the gains you get from modern medicine right there. The rest is essentially incremental improvement plus trauma surgery; maybe you could stretch and throw obstetricians in that as well.
Alongside the bigotry they have also been dealt debilitating losses in war, militarily and morally by Israel.
I suspect that even if we try to buy off each Palestinian with a billion dollars, many will spit on it since they place avenging their defeat over everything else, including their own prosperity.
I am a bit worried that Social media is biasing my opinions on Muslims given how the response of the vast majority of the Muslim diaspora has been extremely predictable with a small minority even being willing to concede that this looks really bad and perhaps there are lines that shouldn't be crossed.
I say this because I am good friends with a number of muslims (Indians) and I now sometimes wonder if the warmth only exists because I never discuss politics IRL.
---- A few minutes later ----
Now that the burst of angst has passed by and with a more clear mind I'd hope the general materialism that pervades middle class Indian thought also includes the Muslims since it is a much easier vice to control or justify.
sky high unemployment rate, youthful population, the corrosive mental effects of dependence on outsiders/foreign aid, and hatred of their neighbors/occupiers inculcated from birth. perfect cocktail for insurgency
As we’ve discussed, the IDF will be humiliated if they go into Gaza on foot, and I say that as someone very sympathetic to Zionism. It’s a losing move. Expelling the Palestinians isn’t viable, Sisi can never accept them given recent Egyptian history with the Muslim brotherhood and obviously nobody else is going to take them, especially not the surrounding states and not Europe either in the current political climate. I don’t consider genocide likely (we can quibble about definitions but I’d say 200,000 or more Gazan casualties would likely meet that definition), but who knows at this point.
In general I’m no big believer in democracy. I think the solution, if the Israelis were to commit to the extreme casualties required, would be large scale indoctrination, a combination of extreme laicite and Full Xinjiang (VoA propaganda edition). The same, of course, would have to happen to the Ultra Orthodox to save Israel, and perhaps no less harshly - children taken from families, religious dress banned, religious media heavily curtailed, forcible secularization and so on. Of course, it will never happen, so regardless of what happens with the Arabs (and there my loyalties are clear enough), Israel will continue to decline into another desert shithole, which was perhaps always its ultimate fate. American Jews can only hope we never have to move there.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
2rafa 6mo ago
The same, of course, would have to happen to the Ultra Orthodox to save Israel, and perhaps no less harshly - children taken from families, religious dress banned, religious media heavily curtailed, forcible secularization and so on.
Why kill the hen that lays demographic eggs? As long as there are enough secular Jews, haredim are an interest-bearing account that shouldn't be touched if you don't really have to.
There are already tensions with them no? Self-inflicted poverty and disproportionate use of social benefits, not serving in the IDF, doing things to antagonize Christians and thus the West in general. If the opportunity to find a solution to the problem presents itself, some may take it. And in demographic terms, unless the OTD numbers get much higher, you're talking about a proportional increase in a net drain on resources for minimal economic growth and military capacity.
Because Israel is a democracy, and the switch from “they’re not a threat, we could convert them any time if we wanted to” to “oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, now we live under a feckless theocracy that spurns modernity” can happen so quickly you don’t notice it until after it’s happened.
Perhaps these so-called democracy-enjoyers should think a little more about breeding if they are concerned about the country democratically turning into a theocracy.
Why does it even matter to them anyway?
Most of them will probably be dead by the time it becomes a theocracy, and if they are not, they can still probably enjoy the spoils of some other dying democracy.
In general I’m no big believer in democracy. I think the solution, if the Israelis were to commit to the extreme casualties required, would be large scale indoctrination, a combination of extreme and Full Xinjiang (VoA propaganda edition).
In that case Jews can probably count on the protection of the red tribe as long as they don’t stab their benefactors in the back too hard. Normie republicans, including younger ones, absolutely love Israel and are generally supportive of Jews.
Since there are no realistic, viable solutions on hand, I wonder: what would/could China do in this situation?
There is Xinjiang, of course, but Muslims there were not nearly so well-armed as Hamas (their big terrorist attack being a knifing at a train station), and Uyghers weren't nearly as hostile to Han people as Palestinians are to Israeli Jews. And the ratio of Han to Uygher is much better than Israeli to Gazan.
China also has substantially more informal state capacity than Israel as well: subduing Xinjiang wasn't a project of the PLA but 1.5 million CCP cadres deployed to control ~20M Uyghers. Given there are 2M Gazans, this suggests Israel would need at least 150k and more likely 300k for a similar project in Gaza. Maybe offer some kind of multi-year Birthright trip to subdue Gaza? Doesn't seem plausible.
It seems like, even if Israel did have the will to go full Xinjiang, it just doesn't have the capacity to. (Which I don't think you or anyone serious is calling for.)
China also has substantially more informal state capacity than Israel as well: subduing Xinjiang wasn't a project of the PLA but 1.5 million CCP cadres deployed to control ~20M Uyghers.
FYI Xinjiang has a population of 25M, and apparently Uyghers only comprise 45% of that (11.6M, concentrated in certain areas), while Han comprised 42% (10.9M). Im not sure about the 1.5M number you gave here, but basically the ratio would demand even more Israelis to govern Gaza.
Another thing people forget about China/CCP's towards Xinjiang is that it started basically since Xinjiang was absorbed into the PRC in 1949. Actually the ideas of settling non-Turkic (aka non-Uygher), non-Muslim Chinese (mostly Han) in Xinjiang started in the 1830s during the Qing Dynasty. More of the Han migration into XJ were spurred by the Sino-Soviet split. By 1970s XJ was already 40% Han, and it's only increased since then.
This means China/CCP has had a lot of time to experiment and try different policies etc in Xinjiang. All the while, China was experiencing unrest and protests inside Xinjiang, and terror attacks/bombings/killings outside of Xinjiang. Seriously read through the timeline here, there's a ton of interesting events and stories. I mean, who knew China was training and equipping some of the Afghan Mujahadeen against the Soviets!?
And as China has gotten richer, it has been able to allocate more resources to controlling XJ. Combine more resources with the aforementioned experience, China/CCP has only become more effective at governing XJ and pacifying the population there.
But yeah in the end, Israel is a tiny place and they only have so many people, and a country that is always cognizant of being surrounded by potential/historical enemies. Plus Israel does respect some (?) press freedoms, and Gazans can freely access the internet, so the PR battle can be quite difficult for Israel.
Meanwhile, to a normal Chinese living in Beijing or Shanghai, Xinjiang is this near-mythical faraway place that produces grapes and now is starting to become a ski destination. There used to be more visible Uygher population in big cities, most visible in halal restaurants (and it personally felt like all marijuana dealers were Uygher, apparently grown in Xinjiang. No the weed was not good at all). They are a lot less visible in cities today, from personal experience. Unless a big terrorist act succeeds (2014 train station attack for example), the general Chinese public really doesn't think about Xinjiang. Then you add on information restrictions for internet, and the internal censorship, and the lack of any foreign press in Xinjiang - occasionally some news article can "shed light" but in the end, no foreign journalist would be able to access Xinjiang like they can access Gaza. The PR battle is totally different versus TikToks made by Palestinians showcasing what it's like on the ground when Israel bombs Gaza.
China also culturally out-muscles the universe of Xinjiang's culturally-compatible neighbors. Israel does not. Egypt alone is a cultural powerhouse in film and television, and the rest of the Arabic-speaking world is producing mountains of music and TV and literature. They'd have to cut off the Palestinians from the outside world on a permanent basis to avoid outside influences.
In 2022, Israel published 6971 books, so about as much as the entire arab world.
Reports and studies have shown significantly low reading levels in the Arab world. The average reading time for an Arab child is six minutes a year compared with 12,000 minutes in the West, according to the Arab Thought Foundation’s Arab Report for Cultural Development. The reading rate of an Arab individual is a quarter of a page a year compared with 11 books in the US and seven books in the UK, according to a study conducted by the Supreme Council of Culture in Egypt.
In the 1980s, number of books translated per million people, per five years: Arab world 4.4, Hungary 519, Spain 920 .
In terms of quantity, and notwithstanding the increase in the number of translated books from 175 per year during 1970-1975 to 330, the number of books translated in the Arab world is one fifth of the number translated in Greece. The aggregate total of translated books from the Al-Ma’moon era to the present day amounts to 10,000 books - equivalent to what Spain translates in a single year (Shawki Galal, in Arabic, 1999, 87)
Spain isn't really relevant here. How many books are written by Uyghur authors outside China? Or by authors speaking mutually intelligible languages from similar cultural groups.
Without running a full prison, you can't cut Israeli Arabs off from the rest of the Arab world and their cultural products.
In my mind genocide starts at decent odds of locally wiping out the subject population. For Gaza Arabs, that conversation might start at 200,000 but it won't really start to become hard to recover from until 500,000+
Before genociding the whole Palestinian population, Israel must first genocide one-half of it.
Before genociding one-half of the whole Palestination, Israel must first genocide one-half of it.
Before genociding onaf of the onaf wholstination, Is'rl must first genocide one-half of it.
...
Therefore genocide [of the Palestinian population] is impossible.
If Israel were to physically remove say all of a given members of a certain generation of the Palestination, say the 50+ years olds,
but that population, was, over the next or 5 next years, replenished by virtue of the previous generation aging into it,
and so on and so forth for every generation, would it still be the same Palestination?
Genocide is the destruction of a group. The cide of a genos. Obviously killing 1 person, however motivated, isn't genocide. Obviously killing every single person in that group is genocide. Where you draw the lines in the middle is the question, I don't see what your little word games have to do with it.
As we’ve discussed, the IDF will be humiliated if they go into Gaza on foot, and I say that as someone very sympathetic to Zionism. It’s a losing move.
I've seen lots of anticipation of a ground operation, but very little in the way of what its actual goals would be. What would the IDF's success criteria be, short of "roll in and flatten any buildings that return fire until either an unconditional surrender is reached, or no buildings are left"? I don't think global opinion is going to give them quite that much of a leash. Are there specific targets they might want to get their hands boots on?
Even unconditional surrender wouldn't help. Suppose the surviving leaders of Hamas surrender and actually honor it. In very short order you'll have some new organization appearing to continue the fight.
Yes, but it is more important that they are irrelevant. If all of them were magicked out of existence, a replacement class of grifter-terrorists would quickly emerge to soak up aid money and attempt to kill Jews. The only solution is complete isolation of Gaza from all foreign aid for decades or total ethnic cleansing of either Gaza or Israel.
Gaza is already "ethnically cleansed". The word you're looking for is "genocide". I expect ethnically cleansing Israel (that is, moving all the Jews elsewhere) and giving the Palestinians their "river to sea" would probably work as far as Jews are concerned (they'd probably step up attacks on Lebanese and Egyptian Christians though, or just turn on other Muslim Arabs). Except you'd never get the Jews to agree.
Israel had already killed an estimated 250 Palestinians, including 47 children, this year alone
If I search for "Palestinians killed by Israeli military" and set a limit on results no later than 10/1/2023 to keep the current war out, I see stories like these:
This smells like the stats on police killings in America. The ratio is very lopsided in favor of the trained professionals, which should not be at all surprising. Similarly, if the targets submitted to arrest, then there would be no lethal violence.
And "children" is conveniently ambiguous as teenagers are plenty capable of presenting themselves as a lethal threat.
We just saw what happens when Gazans aren’t stopped from breaking the border fence and going into Israel. I think live fire was fully justified, both at the time and in retrospect.
They shot more than 6,000 people and only 183 died? What were they being shot with?
That’s about 33:1.
These ratios are similarly odd:
The large-scale killing and maiming of 30 March last year, when 18 people were killed and over 700 people shot, and of 14 May, when 60 people were killed and over 1100 people shot, must not be repeated. “The shooting must stop,” said Sara Hossain.
For comparison, Steven Paddock killed 60 and wounded 400, about 7.6:1. And he wasn’t even aiming at anyone in particular. The report says that protesters were shot by military snipers.
In addition, even the UN sheepishly admits that the protestors engaged in "significant violence" but that it doesn't technically constitute a "combat or military campaign". Hamas did what it always does: It deliberately mixes violent, dangerous offenders with children and other sympathetic victims, and when in the chaos the sympathethic victims are hurt, they go complain and pretend it's Israels fault. In comparison, Hamas goes into a village and deliberately executes children.
to create a people. Not to destroy one. These people are not only losing out in demography but also they are losing the soul of the nation. Their spirit will not survive a Gazan genocide.
It's remarkable to me how often the comparison to 9/11 has been made here and in the broader conversation, yet nobody has ever bothered to carry that thought through to it's conclusion. Yes, the direct analogy where hundreds/thousands of Americans/Israelis were murdered by terrorists in their home countries is obvious. But why stop there and leave out the fact that the next twenty years saw a massive belligerent overcorrection and self-destructive wars abroad? Wars that nobody, even conservatives who presumably voted for Bush twice and raked Obama over the coals for being soft on terror/homeland security, will currently defend? It's all too easy to see a future where Israel will regret the actions it takes over the next few months as the entire nation is baying for Palestinian blood.
The local growing consensus around what is effectively genocide is also a mistake. Your personal DR pro-HBD/white supremacist bubbles are blinding you to what the normies think. If Israel 'does a genocide,' as people here have been saying, they're finished in the eyes of normies for at least a few decades. Not to mention the rank hypocrisy inherent in a nation and people who spent decades saying 'never again' will have changed their tune to 'never again, to us.'
The funniest thing about this entire debacle has been the overnight dissolution of the standard battle lines. Suddenly pro-Palestine leftist protestors flashing swastikas at Jews are shoulder-to-shoulder with stormfront White Nationalists. Center-left/center-right politicians and normies are largely united in condemning Hamas, hypocrisy around military aid and foreign interventionism be damned. Even here, there's a consensus that 'the media' is biased trash written by subhuman retards who were too low-IQ to code or do STEM in college, but half the comments claim they're bought and paid for by our Jewish overlords whilst the other half accuse them of institutional capture by pro-Palestinian leftists who will propagandize every civilian casualty due to a righteous freedom bomb dropped by the IDF. Neither bother to do a cursory check of the NYT cover page which would largely falsify both claims, but there's also nobody left to push back or call them on it.
Lest I be accused of being a dirty Muslim-loving commie anti-semite, I made the conscious decision to do my best to ignore Israel/Palestine over a decade ago after watching protestors rage at each other on a weekly basis at my college campus. Obligatory Hamas bad, rape and murder of civilians bad, what happened to innocent civilians in Israel was an atrocity, by all means go decapitate Hamas. But be careful in how far you go in the heat of the moment.
Western Jews are assimilating into the PMC deracinated blob at a breathtaking pace. They are losing the set of assumptions that motivated them to identify with their kin in Israel, and they are losing the power that comes from ethnic favoritism.
Good. Why should I shed a tear for the passing of ethnic favoritism in my home country? I'll take national unity over sinecures and in-grouping based on religion anyday.
But why stop there and leave out the fact that the next twenty years saw a massive belligerent overcorrection and self-destructive wars abroad? Wars that nobody, even conservatives who presumably voted for Bush twice and raked Obama over the goals for being soft on terror/homeland security, will currently defend? It's all too easy to see a future where Israel will regret the actions it takes over the next few months as the entire nation is baying for Palestinian blood.
Because our error was not extracting Afghani blood. There should not be a single tribesman ever associated with the Taliban alive today. The error of the US following 9/11 was caused by the same sort of people who sent out tweets from Biden admin accounts (SOS IIRC) calling for a ceasefire even before the raping in Israeli territory had stopped. Those people robbed us of victory in Afghanistan. The Y chromosome lineage in that country should look like there was a black death that affected only men. Baying for blood is not the problem, the problem is people who think that "civilians" actually exist in a theater where most of Hamas's military operations are based in schools, mosques, and hospitals.
The Taliban did not attack the United States. The leaders of the Taliban protected (and possibly assisted) the people who did. In hindsight, the US should have gone in, killed the incumbent Taliban leaders, held parts of the country long enough to kill the terrorists and destroy their camps (which was done early in the invasion, IIRC), and then left. Basically a massive punitive raid. Whoever took over afterwards would get the message that if you aid the enemies of the United States, the United States will kill you. (Said message could also be delivered by an actual diplomat if it didn't seem like the new leaders could connect the dots). No need to hold the place for decades.
I wish a one-state solution felt realistic — a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate, is a version of Israel that I would adore. But it seems less and less realistic with every new act of violence.
This sentence bothered me a lot, because I think it really hammers home that Ike Saul is drowning in both-sides-ism. There is a world where Israelis and Muslims and Jews live side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate: it's called "Israel." The 20% of Israel's citizens who are Palestinian Arabs are not the problem, here. Those Palestinians who turned their noses up at a single state solution put themselves (and their descendants) in the "box" Saul decries. Hamas does not want a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights. Only the Israelis want that. There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights.
Israelis will tell you that if Palestinians put their guns down then the war would end, but if Israel put their guns down they'd be wiped off the planet. I don't have a crystal ball and can’t tell you what is true. But what I am certain of is that every time Israel kills more innocents they engender more rage and hatred and recruit more Palestinians and Arabs to the cause against them. There is no disputing this.
It's amazing to watch people equivocate in their response to this single, incredibly hard truth. The reason Israelis tell you this is because all the evidence points to it being true. To say "there is no disputing" that Israelis killing innocents engenders rage, and yet mumble about crystal balls when it is pointed out that Hamas and their backers are fully committed to the extermination of Israel, is insane to me. Exactly one side of this conflict is openly genocidal, and it's not the Israelis. "Oh I agree that Hamas is evil but it's very important that we blame Israel even for that" is such a mind-boggling take, to me.
To be completely clear, you think that absent persecution, a noticeable number of people entitled by law to live in Israel would continue to live in Lebanon?
Lebanon is not a peaceful society, and maintaining a large group membership seems pretty important for keeping yourself in that society, but multiple kinds of Christians and Muslims do in fact live side by side there, and do in fact have actual in practice equal rights there.
To be completely clear, you think that absent persecution, a noticeable number of people entitled by law to live in Israel would continue to live in Lebanon?
I have not said that, nor does that seem to me in any way relevant to the conversation. The standard set by the article was:
a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate
In the first place, "living side by side" connotes a measure of peace, which you acknowledge Lebanon lacks. In the second, the Jews living there clearly do not regard themselves as enjoying equal rights. "But some Christians do!" is not a refutation of any kind.
I do not know what you think to prove. You seem at best trying to pick a nit grounded in my paraphrasing, and yet even then you are doing it badly.
I'm mystified by this kind of response to my claim, which explicitly cribs the words of the article about "Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights." Suggesting countries that are neither noticeably diverse nor countries that are in any plausible way committed to equal rights does not meet the spirit of the original text. "Not counting expats, we have like, two or three different religious minorities in our country!" is, I grant, a kind of "diversity," but this is still not a cultural (much less jurisprudential) commitment to the kind of broad-spectrum liberal tolerance Westerners have in mind when they talk about diverse peoples living "side by side with equal rights."
"Lebanese Jews are afraid for their lives, but they do have Christians so technically they are a nation of diverse people living side by side" does not meet the standard of "Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights." And that's before addressing stuff like sex, sexuality, political freedom, and related concerns.
Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights
Jews usually have protected statuses in Western countries, with specific laws or law enforcement rules protecting them, social media companies having antisemitism-specific regulations and anti-antisemitism groups openly controlling their content...
Meanwhile there are anti-muslims rules and laws against hijabs, mosque building, honor-killing, etc.
It seems to me that it would be hard to say that muslims and jews have equal rights in the West.
This sentence bothered me a lot, because I think it really hammers home that Ike Saul is drowning in both-sides-ism. There is a world where Israelis and Muslims and Jews live side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate: it's called "Israel."
To add to this, it omits Christians, who have been ethnically cleansed from almost all of Israel's neighboring states to the extent that just glassing Gaza entirely would barely put Israel on par with them, but maybe not even on par.
Speaking of which, how are Gaza’s Christians doing? The rumors of St Porphyrius church getting blown up don’t appear to be true, but Christians in Gaza seem like they have better odds of convincing someone to take them in on the basis of ‘we’re not terrorists, just ruled by crazy people’.
Quit your lying. The Israeli negotiating position at Oslo and Camp David was colossally disingenuous and offered terms nobody would accept.
What made this deal especially difficult for the Palestinians to accept was the fact that they had already agreed in the 1993 Oslo Accords to recognize Israeli sovereignty over 78 percent of the original British Mandate. 124 From their perspective, they were now being asked to make another major concession and accept at best 86 percent of the remaining 22 percent.
The Palestinians maintain that the West Bank would have been divided into three cantons separated by Israeli territory. Israelis dispute this claim, but Barak himself acknowledges that Israel would have maintained control of a "razor-thin" wedge of territory running from Jerusalem to the Jordan River Valley. 125 This wedge, which would completely bisect the West Bank, was essential to Israel's plan to retain control of the Jordan River Valley.
the Palestinians were not offered full sovereignty in a number of Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which made the proposal significantly less attractive to them. Israel would also have kept control over the new Palestinian state's borders, its airspace, and its water resources, and the Palestinians would be permanently barred from building an army to defend themselves
They even admitted negotiations were a joke:
It is hard to imagine any leader accepting these terms. Certainly no other state in the world has such curtailed sovereignty, or faces so many obstacles to building a workable economy and society. 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"
Meanwhile of course, the Israelis were busy adding new 'facts on the ground' like they've been doing the whole time.
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.
If you don't negotiate honestly, in good faith, you won't get a diplomatic solution.
There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights.
Oman? I invite you to substantiate this assertion further. And it's not like Israel's doing great at this either.
There is a world where Israelis and Muslims and Jews live side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate it's called "Israel."
This simply isn't true, even putting to one side all the Muslims they've expelled and designated non-citizens. Taking Arab land and redistributing it to Israeli settlers for instance. Demolishing 100 times more Palestinian houses than they let them build. Refusing to let Arabs, Israeli citizens or not, live in several hundred Israeli small towns. Restrictions on freedom of speech, assembly and movement.
This law creates a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country, cannot.
The Israelis clearly don't want a country where Jews and Muslims live side by side, they want a country where Jews are on top, they take action to achieve it and they've enshrined it into law:
The Knesset in 2018 passed a law with constitutional status affirming Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” declaring that within that territory, the right to self-determination “is unique to the Jewish people,” and establishing “Jewish settlement” as a national value.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the finance minister, said during discussions at the time: “Instead of making it easier for Palestinians who want to get citizenship, we should make the process much more difficult, in order to guarantee Israel’s security and a Jewish majority in Israel.” In March 2019, this time as prime minister, Netanyahu declared, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” but rather “the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.”
Pro-Israel people should base their arguments on the rule of force because they don't really have a leg to stand on in terms of morality.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
RandomRanger 6mo ago
@naraburns might not have modded you for calling him a liar, but I will.
No matter how strongly you feel about someone's opinion, you may not personally attack people, and calling someone a liar is definitely a personal attack. If you genuinely believe someone is lying, you'd better be able to make a very solid case for that beyond "Your opinion is wrong and bad." You aren't a mind-reader, so the bar for accusing someone of lying is very high, and I suggest you don't try.
I have not said anything known to me to be untrue, and I find this level of antagonism as surprising as it is unwarranted.
There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights.
Oman? I invite you to substantiate this assertion further. And it's not like Israel's doing great at this either.
Oman? This Oman? I see no indication that their country qualifies as a counterexample.
As for Israel, I have nothing to say in defense of Israel's own errors. That they are the sole liberal democracy in the Middle East is not an assertion that they are perfect, or even that they are good. I find none of this relevant to any of the statements I made in my previous post. I think @Pasha makes an interesting counterclaim that the 20% Arab population of Israel is being deliberately limited to that in order to preserve the Jewish state, that seems plausible to me. But it is still substantially more tolerant of Arabs and Muslims, than any sharia-oriented country is of Jews. You mentioned Oman, the first sentence of this Wikipedia page is worth chewing on:
There was a Jewish presence in Oman for many centuries, however, the Jewish community of the country is no longer in existence.
Anyway, I think maybe you've confused me for someone else, or something, because most of what you've written here is entirely beside the point. I am not pro-Israel in any meaningful sense of the words. But I am very, very anti-Hamas, to say nothing of their bloodthirsty paymasters.
You mentioned Oman, the first sentence of this Wikipedia page is worth chewing on:
Later sentences in the same article:
In the mid-19th century, the British Lieutenant James Raymond Wellsted documented the Jews of Muscat in his memoirs Travels in Arabia, vol. 1. He mentions that there are "a few Jews in Muskat (sic), who mostly arrived there in 1828, being driven from Baghdad . . .by the cruelties and extortions of the Pacha Daud." He also notes that Jews were not discriminated against at all in Oman, which was not the case in other Arab countries (they did not have to live in Ghettos, nor identify themselves as Jews, not walk in the road if a Muslim was walking on the same street, as was the case in Yemen). The Jews of Muscat were employed mostly in the making of silver ornaments, banking, and liquor sale. Despite the lack of persecution in Oman, the community is believed to have disappeared before 1900.
Agreed on your last paragraph strongly. She wrote a lot of words that basically said she had no solutions. And in all the rambling she said the right answer and rejected it. As long as that is true there really isn’t a solution. The correct thing to do with a homicidal criminal is to put them in prison. And everything seems to indicate it’s not that bad of prison.
The reason a "one-state" solution is impossible is that the current arrangement can only be maintained as long as that ratio doesn't go above 20%-ish (which includes various groups more sympathetic to Israel like Christian Arabs and Druzes). If there was a real one-state, it would not be a functional democracy and certainly not a Jewish one, which is the point of Zionism in the first place. There has never been any doubt that Zionists will not give Arabs political rights unless if they are small enough to not be threatening. Israel purposefully crafted its citizenship laws to exclude vast majority of Arabs, and only expanded the citizenship status slowly and to small groups once Jewish immigration meant that this would not alter the voting population much. It is extremely hypocritical to pretend this is not true and somehow non-Israel passport holder Arabs could get equal political rights if only they wanted. Even in best case scenario (where peace and friendship between the peoples are established by magic tomorrow), this would never be accepted by Israel as there are not enough Jews left in the world to immigrate and keep up the population ratio in Jews' favor.
The reason Israelis tell you this is because all the evidence points to it being true
What is that evidence exactly? West Bank is defanged and as a result it is rapidly being invaded by Jewish settlements inflicting death by thousand cuts to the already tiny Arab ghettoes. And this happens even while Arabs are very much sticking to their guns. Not to mention that the far-right is rapidly taking over Israeli politics. These people are the future.
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Notes -
https://x.com/Ike_Saul/status/1711780282725011520
It is a bit lame to post a twitter link and say I agree with it, but this piece resonates with me so much that I wanted to share it here. I still believe this place is majority composed of reasonable people, notwithstanding the couple of accounts that has spent the last couple of weeks plotting genocide scenarios and reliving their war on terror "they hate us for our freedoms" high one last time.
To delve deeper into the uncomfortable topic of the looming genocide, I also increasingly get the feeling that contrary to the expectations of some whose view of geopolitics is eerily similar to RTS mechanics, the genocidal military power IDF is displaying right now is ultimately going to harm Israel a lot more than it helps. I think it mainly has to do with political/military leadership trying to cover their ass and muffle their enormous failures with the sound of bombs. If IDF really goes through with their plan which seems likely to cost civilian lives in the hundreds of thousands, I don't think the nation of Israel will ever recover from this.
It is a country that is already losing two of its most powerful weapons:
I fully agree that the situation with Gaza is entirely unsustainable. But if Israelis go through with what they are plotting right now, they will slowly but surely find out that they are 7 million souls surviving in an ocean of half a billion through miracles, and they are pissing in the miracle potion.
I agree with your reasoning, but I'm not sure about the assumptions. What exactly do you mean when you say
?
I am of the impression that the Israeli army is preparing to kill directly or through starvation a very significant part of the Gazan population in the coming weeks. They also perhaps hope that the atrocities will be so severe that Egypt will be forced to open the border and let most of the Gazan population to leave.
Of course I might be mistaken but when I listen to the Israeli politicians and the few people I keep in contact with in the country (all of whom I would describe as reasonable people), this is the impression I get.
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I actually agree with most of what he said. It's more what he hasn't said that's the problem.
I'm gonna say, source on this? (not necessarily to you Pasha) Hamas is the legitimately elected government of Gaza. So Mr. Isaac Saul does not believe they "legitimately represent their interests", but who is he to say? They won the last election, how does he know better? Perhaps he is personally friends with a number of reasonable Palestinians in Gaza, but there's no solid indication that they represent a majority. So why isn't it him and whoever he is friends with who do not legitimately represent the actual interests of the majority of Gaza residents? For better or worse, if they are free people, their opinions are what they actually are and what they have proven them to be, not what we would like them to be.
So this is technically true, but it misses the why. They're not doing it because they're great big jerks who just wanna smash some Palestinians (or at least, they weren't before this most recent spate). They're doing it because the Gaza residents have consistently prioritized hurting Israelis any way they can over everything else. They've displayed pretty remarkable levels of cleverness in turning what we would think of as ordinary objects into weapons. If you legitimately try to stop anything that could possibly be turned into some sort of weapon from coming in, you're not left with much. What materials do you think they used to make those para-glider things to drop basically paratroopers into a music festival, and would you block all of those from going into Gaza?
Ultimately, I have no idea what to do with a people who refuse to accept any sort of peace and bend all their efforts towards destroying you no matter what you do to them. Maybe sitting on them hard enough to mostly stop them from attacking you just makes them angrier, but then exactly what are you supposed to do?
Gazans voted for Hamas in 2006, which took over the control of the strip the next year with a coup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaza_(2007)
There hasn’t been any elections ever since and Hamas controls Gaza through widespread torture and executions. It’s openly acknowledged* and widely known that Israeli government (especially Netanyahu) has been more than happy and supportive of this situation since the existence of Hamas makes a two-state solution impossible and gives Israel ample opportunity for further taking over the West Bank. They thought they could handle the heat for the political gains. Turns out they couldn’t.
I am not sure if you are being disingenuous or simply ignorant when you argue Gaza electing Hamas means they are fair game. I was entering most discussions here very combatively last weekend because I thought people were plainly lying, but lately I am realising that people genuinely don’t know much about the history of the conflict and they just like to make big brain statements for the sake of it.
*one thing I really like with every Israeli I ever met is that they are very direct people. Hence you can almost always find videos of an Israeli prime minister openly describing plots which gets you branded as a conspiracy theorist when you describe them to westerners who are used to their government officials talking in absolutely empty sentences all the time.
I do know that, but I don't think it changes anything regarding what I said. They did win the last election, regardless of it being kind of a while ago and however much the Israeli government might have helped. As far as I know, Hamas didn't make any secret of what they believed when those elections were being held; everyone who voted for them must have known what they were all about. There aren't any free opinion polls there, so all we really know is that nobody has managed to successfully overthrow them yet.
I'd honestly love it if the residents of Gaza truly were 80% Jeffersonian classical liberals whose demands for peace and prosperity are not being heard solely due to the brutal oppression of Hamas - that means there is a possible peaceful solution to all this. Sadly, regardless of how much you or I would like for that to be the case, we just don't have any proof of it, and all of the indirect signs suggest it's not.
What if it truly is the case that upwards of 80% of Gazans really do hate the idea of Israel existing at all so much that they don't mind giving up things like running water to hit back at them somehow? What evidence would you accept that that's the case?
For me, a lot of this comes from the, I guess you would call it hangover or backlash from the Iraq war. We were told the same things during the runup to that. Hey, the only reason this place is a mess is because Saddam Hussein is a big fat jerk. If we just bump him off, it'll be a nice stable Democracy in a snap. The Bush admin said it. I remember reading all of the blogs saying it at the time. I probably said it to a few people myself. I wanted to believe it. Then, reality hit us all in the face. Saddam was actually keeping a lid on a lot of beefs that promptly blew up in our faces as soon as his regime was out of the picture. Through a tremendous effort in both blood and treasure by the most powerful military in the world, we eventually managed to get it sort of kind of under control. At least until ISIS gobbled up a good chunk of it. But let's not get too far into recent Middle East happenings. Bottom line is that it is a nice and seductive idea that there's all a bunch of nice kind peaceful people in these places who are being oppressed by a minority of nutcases, but it's just not the case. We've had our faces rubbed into it good and hard by now.
I think often of this old-ish, since deleted article I read a while back during the Iraq war and Arab Spring. A Western blogger / journalist meets an Egyptian political blogger for a little tour of Cairo and a few conversations. In one, he asks this Egyptian guy, a classical liberal there, "How many people here think like you do?". The answer was "Few, very few. Less than ten percent probably." Also note how the Taliban took over Afghanistan about 20 minutes after the US Military left. The way I see it, it's just a fact that a majority of people in that region really do think this way. Nothing we try to do in the region will work right if we continue to refuse to accept this even when it's staring us in the face.
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“You cannot keep two million people living in the conditions people in Gaza are living in and expect peace.”
This is entirely correct. It glosses over the fact that “the conditions people in Gaza are living in” is the result of their chosen policies - namely, putting resources into Jew-killing efforts rather than nation-building efforts - but it’s still entirely true.
Given that those people cannot be allowed into Israel, and that they don’t show any signs of trying to improve their own living conditions, the only way out of this situation is for them to simply be somewhere else. Preferably they could go to many different somewhere elses, such that their culture could be diluted in their hosts’ culture until finally it disappears.
A result of Hamas' policies. I guess you can say that voting for Hamas once and having them defenestrate any opposition and rule via pure violence makes them culpable but I think it's a dubious argument - especially given how young Gaza. If people voted for Saddam once I doubt starving Iraqis would be seen as a matter of putting the moral responsibility where it belongs. You can claim it's a military or political necessity but the conscience-soothing explanation doesn't seem sufficient.
No need for conscience soothing here. A culture that produces this kind of violence has no right to exist, as far as I’m concerned.
In any case, I’ve seen no evidence that the people of Gaza are actually ideologically opposed to Hamas, and plenty to the contrary.
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It's worse than mere neglect. They actively scrap basic necessities to fashion into weapons to kill jews.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/10/eu-funded-water-pipelines-hamas-rockets/#:~:text=In%202021%20footage%20emerged%20of,fashioned%20into%20home%2Dmade%20rockets.&text=Their%20main%20armament%20has%20been,fertiliser%20and%20commercially%20available%20explosives.
They've basically torn up all the old infrastructure the Israeli's left behind, and built rockets with them. Then have the nerve to complain that their basic necessities are so terrible. What's that saying about the definition of hutzpah? Murdering your parents and then begging the court for mercy because you are an orphan?
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Israel is, yes, in a no win situation. If they punish Hamas as is appropriate, and any other state would, they will face down an increasingly hostile press and international community which will exaggerate every "civilian" death and downplay every destruction of a rocket site that is located in the middle of a mosque, school, etc as unnecessary.
Will Israel lose this long term? Probably. But it will have nothing to do with Israel's choices. They have faced a stacked deck as long as I have been alive where they are essentially banned from using their strengths, because the media considers real strength to be an evil.
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I think Israel will do just fine with «if you kill your enemies, you win» logic.
As Netanyahu (easily an intellectual and moral peer to those founders) has said five years ago:
There's only one problem with this: Israel is fairly dependent on the outside community for support. They can't afford to turn into a pariah state by ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza.
Here's the solution (if the problem ever presents itself): Diaspora members commit to obstruct hiring for "supporters of Hamas" and nobody makes Israel a pariah state. Indians are already aware of this technique.
Diaspora Jews are neither monolithic enough nor centrally coordinated enough to make this feasible. Palestinians have a nontrivial amount of support in the West which is why Israel hasn't been able to solve the problem despite decades of conflict, and this is showing no likelihood of change anytime soon.
At this point I don't know if you're joking or not.
I am not. Seeing AGP transsexual, BLM-fists, colored-hair, tear-down-patriarchy, immigrants-welcome, religion-sucks, Israel-is-a-colonial-power, Bibi-is-a-fascist Jews in my network absolutely froth at the mouths and clamor for genocide (supported by kind Christian doctors), I do not believe that the Diaspora will need any more coordination on this topic than long-standing Zionist organizations and the collective shaming of dissenters by people who've just lost their relatives (and Jews tend to be acutely aware of their distant cousins and aunts, so there are very very many Jews in mourning now), and their friends, provide. Crucially, I do not believe there is very much capacity and coordination needed to overcome lobbying of Palestinians, or even broadly Muslims.
But we shall see – both how this goes, and what it costs Israel. For now I predict that there won't be genocide (@2rafa, probably referencing the idea of "decimation", tentatively defines it as "200,000 or more Gazan casualties" and I'm inclined to agree, so – there'll be less then that), and there won't be any lasting cost in the West.
Saudis sure are embarrassed already, though.
Have to say I really haven’t seen much of this. The biggest frothers are the already hardcore Zionists, often outright conservative aligned even if never Trump. The numerical bulk, at least in my social circles, slightly less extreme, are lawyer and gym owner and dance instructor and and finance types who obviously vote Democrat and maybe had a black square on Instagram in 2020 , but they’re not blue hair AGP ‘Israel is an apartheid state’ types at all. Those mostly posted both side messages, and are now back to the regularly scheduled Palestineposting about Gazan civilians and open air prison etc.
I am not saying they are representative of their group, just that it has reached even that group; and the moral sanction for ethnic cleansing won't be as hard to procure as their usual sympathies suggest.
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Except it looks that they are, the storm of doxxing, deplatforming and cancelling everyone showing the slightest sympathy to Hamas is impressive, not even non-binary persons of color are spared this time.
Not any more. Peak Palestine moment was probably the Second Intifada, around the time of "Battle of Jenin", this objectively rather minor affair was at the time headline news worldwide and treated like new Stalingrad battle.
Since then, Palestine cause was downgraded and now the gloves are coming off. France bans pro-Palestinian protests and Germany promises crackdown on burning Israeli flag.
The Palestine moment is over, expect Palestinian symbols and sympathizers to be treated like Nazi ones (no, this does not mean being celebrated by Canadian parliament).
edit: links
The Harvard doxxing truck isn't evidence of much since it was condemned by most people on campus, including the Harvard Hillel. People have been giving Israel a pass due to the warcrimes of Hamas like the decapitated babies, but that'll end in a few news cycles when there's been nothing but story after story of Israel pounding Gaza.
For every story of the West being pro-Israel, there's another one saying they shouldn't go too far or that they've lost sympathy altogether. Unless we have solid data (not mere anecdotes) showing decisive long-term shifts one way or the other, we should default to assuming events will roughly follow the status quo.
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I empathize with the writer, but any piece that concludes "I don't have any answers" I think loses the right to say "but this isn't the answer". There are no good options here, I think we can all acknowledge that. But there are options, and one of them must be chosen.
In my opinion the least-bad choice is the liquidation of Hamas and the ongoing occupation of Gaza to prevent a similar group arising in their place. It may or may not even be possible, and if it is possible it will cost a lot of lives. But it at least has half a chance of preventing the large scale organized terrorism Hamas perpetrates and can prevent the kind of brainwashing (like kindergarteners being made to act out terrorist operations) that makes the ongoing cycle of violence impossible to break.
Hard agree on this. What makes Israel vs Palestine so difficult isn't that it's a complicated history, since that's true of nearly every major conflict. The problem is that it's gone so far down the toxoplasmic spiral that neither side is willing to compromise, so there are only bad options. But one must be chosen as you said.
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What exactly is so bad about Gaza?
As far as I can tell, until the recent turmoil:
they had electricity
life expectancy was 75 years so they presumably have some reasonable healthcare
obesity rate is 20% so presumably they have enough to eat
they can't leave, but the blockade only begun in earnest after the battle of gaza in 2007. Also Egypt is also not letting them in
I wouldn't want to personally live there, but it didn't exactly seem like hell on earth and much of what's wrong with it is the result of the gazans' own actions.
Fair enough although you get a LOT of mileage out of germ theory, half-decent sanitation, vaccines, and cheap readily available antibiotics. Obstetrics makes a difference too. If you combine that with half-decent nutrition you no shit have most of the gains you get from modern medicine right there. The rest is essentially incremental improvement plus trauma surgery; maybe you could stretch and throw obstetricians in that as well.
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2rafa calls them an honour based tribal culture.
Alongside the bigotry they have also been dealt debilitating losses in war, militarily and morally by Israel.
I suspect that even if we try to buy off each Palestinian with a billion dollars, many will spit on it since they place avenging their defeat over everything else, including their own prosperity.
I am a bit worried that Social media is biasing my opinions on Muslims given how the response of the vast majority of the Muslim diaspora has been extremely predictable with a small minority even being willing to concede that this looks really bad and perhaps there are lines that shouldn't be crossed.
I say this because I am good friends with a number of muslims (Indians) and I now sometimes wonder if the warmth only exists because I never discuss politics IRL.
---- A few minutes later ----
Now that the burst of angst has passed by and with a more clear mind I'd hope the general materialism that pervades middle class Indian thought also includes the Muslims since it is a much easier vice to control or justify.
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sky high unemployment rate, youthful population, the corrosive mental effects of dependence on outsiders/foreign aid, and hatred of their neighbors/occupiers inculcated from birth. perfect cocktail for insurgency
many other countries have similar conditions, now and historically, and it didn't lead to anything like this
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As we’ve discussed, the IDF will be humiliated if they go into Gaza on foot, and I say that as someone very sympathetic to Zionism. It’s a losing move. Expelling the Palestinians isn’t viable, Sisi can never accept them given recent Egyptian history with the Muslim brotherhood and obviously nobody else is going to take them, especially not the surrounding states and not Europe either in the current political climate. I don’t consider genocide likely (we can quibble about definitions but I’d say 200,000 or more Gazan casualties would likely meet that definition), but who knows at this point.
In general I’m no big believer in democracy. I think the solution, if the Israelis were to commit to the extreme casualties required, would be large scale indoctrination, a combination of extreme laicite and Full Xinjiang (VoA propaganda edition). The same, of course, would have to happen to the Ultra Orthodox to save Israel, and perhaps no less harshly - children taken from families, religious dress banned, religious media heavily curtailed, forcible secularization and so on. Of course, it will never happen, so regardless of what happens with the Arabs (and there my loyalties are clear enough), Israel will continue to decline into another desert shithole, which was perhaps always its ultimate fate. American Jews can only hope we never have to move there.
Why kill the hen that lays demographic eggs? As long as there are enough secular Jews, haredim are an interest-bearing account that shouldn't be touched if you don't really have to.
There are already tensions with them no? Self-inflicted poverty and disproportionate use of social benefits, not serving in the IDF, doing things to antagonize Christians and thus the West in general. If the opportunity to find a solution to the problem presents itself, some may take it. And in demographic terms, unless the OTD numbers get much higher, you're talking about a proportional increase in a net drain on resources for minimal economic growth and military capacity.
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Because Israel is a democracy, and the switch from “they’re not a threat, we could convert them any time if we wanted to” to “oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, now we live under a feckless theocracy that spurns modernity” can happen so quickly you don’t notice it until after it’s happened.
Perhaps these so-called democracy-enjoyers should think a little more about breeding if they are concerned about the country democratically turning into a theocracy. Why does it even matter to them anyway? Most of them will probably be dead by the time it becomes a theocracy, and if they are not, they can still probably enjoy the spoils of some other dying democracy.
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I believe this would also be considered genocide.
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Muslim immigrants becoming an important DNC grievance group aligned with the already existing generally antisemetic DNC grievance groups.
In that case Jews can probably count on the protection of the red tribe as long as they don’t stab their benefactors in the back too hard. Normie republicans, including younger ones, absolutely love Israel and are generally supportive of Jews.
Plus negative polarization and all that.
They'd have to move out of the cities still... Red tribe can't protect you when you are a Jew in and 80% Dem city.
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Since there are no realistic, viable solutions on hand, I wonder: what would/could China do in this situation?
There is Xinjiang, of course, but Muslims there were not nearly so well-armed as Hamas (their big terrorist attack being a knifing at a train station), and Uyghers weren't nearly as hostile to Han people as Palestinians are to Israeli Jews. And the ratio of Han to Uygher is much better than Israeli to Gazan.
China also has substantially more informal state capacity than Israel as well: subduing Xinjiang wasn't a project of the PLA but 1.5 million CCP cadres deployed to control ~20M Uyghers. Given there are 2M Gazans, this suggests Israel would need at least 150k and more likely 300k for a similar project in Gaza. Maybe offer some kind of multi-year Birthright trip to subdue Gaza? Doesn't seem plausible.
It seems like, even if Israel did have the will to go full Xinjiang, it just doesn't have the capacity to. (Which I don't think you or anyone serious is calling for.)
FYI Xinjiang has a population of 25M, and apparently Uyghers only comprise 45% of that (11.6M, concentrated in certain areas), while Han comprised 42% (10.9M). Im not sure about the 1.5M number you gave here, but basically the ratio would demand even more Israelis to govern Gaza.
Another thing people forget about China/CCP's towards Xinjiang is that it started basically since Xinjiang was absorbed into the PRC in 1949. Actually the ideas of settling non-Turkic (aka non-Uygher), non-Muslim Chinese (mostly Han) in Xinjiang started in the 1830s during the Qing Dynasty. More of the Han migration into XJ were spurred by the Sino-Soviet split. By 1970s XJ was already 40% Han, and it's only increased since then.
This means China/CCP has had a lot of time to experiment and try different policies etc in Xinjiang. All the while, China was experiencing unrest and protests inside Xinjiang, and terror attacks/bombings/killings outside of Xinjiang. Seriously read through the timeline here, there's a ton of interesting events and stories. I mean, who knew China was training and equipping some of the Afghan Mujahadeen against the Soviets!?
And as China has gotten richer, it has been able to allocate more resources to controlling XJ. Combine more resources with the aforementioned experience, China/CCP has only become more effective at governing XJ and pacifying the population there.
But yeah in the end, Israel is a tiny place and they only have so many people, and a country that is always cognizant of being surrounded by potential/historical enemies. Plus Israel does respect some (?) press freedoms, and Gazans can freely access the internet, so the PR battle can be quite difficult for Israel.
Meanwhile, to a normal Chinese living in Beijing or Shanghai, Xinjiang is this near-mythical faraway place that produces grapes and now is starting to become a ski destination. There used to be more visible Uygher population in big cities, most visible in halal restaurants (and it personally felt like all marijuana dealers were Uygher, apparently grown in Xinjiang. No the weed was not good at all). They are a lot less visible in cities today, from personal experience. Unless a big terrorist act succeeds (2014 train station attack for example), the general Chinese public really doesn't think about Xinjiang. Then you add on information restrictions for internet, and the internal censorship, and the lack of any foreign press in Xinjiang - occasionally some news article can "shed light" but in the end, no foreign journalist would be able to access Xinjiang like they can access Gaza. The PR battle is totally different versus TikToks made by Palestinians showcasing what it's like on the ground when Israel bombs Gaza.
As far as the 1.5 million number, I got it from a admittedly throwaway line in https://interpret.csis.org/imposing-the-partys-core-values-in-xinjiang/
Other sources, suggesting 1.1M as of 2018 and "over a million" at the end of 2019:
https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-prayer-weddings-occasions-9ca1c29fc9554c1697a8729bba4dd93b
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/become-family-china-sends-officials-to-stay-with-xinjiang-minorities-1.4118327
Good catch on Xinjiang's ethnic makeup being only around half Uygher.
Thanks, was curious on how that was sources/calculated
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China also culturally out-muscles the universe of Xinjiang's culturally-compatible neighbors. Israel does not. Egypt alone is a cultural powerhouse in film and television, and the rest of the Arabic-speaking world is producing mountains of music and TV and literature. They'd have to cut off the Palestinians from the outside world on a permanent basis to avoid outside influences.
Don’t know about music, but mountains of literature, definitely not.
Spain isn't really relevant here. How many books are written by Uyghur authors outside China? Or by authors speaking mutually intelligible languages from similar cultural groups.
Without running a full prison, you can't cut Israeli Arabs off from the rest of the Arab world and their cultural products.
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In my mind genocide starts at decent odds of locally wiping out the subject population. For Gaza Arabs, that conversation might start at 200,000 but it won't really start to become hard to recover from until 500,000+
Before genociding the whole Palestinian population, Israel must first genocide one-half of it.
Before genociding one-half of the whole Palestination, Israel must first genocide one-half of it.
Before genociding onaf of the onaf wholstination, Is'rl must first genocide one-half of it. ...
Therefore genocide [of the Palestinian population] is impossible.
If Israel were to physically remove say all of a given members of a certain generation of the Palestination, say the 50+ years olds, but that population, was, over the next or 5 next years, replenished by virtue of the previous generation aging into it, and so on and so forth for every generation, would it still be the same Palestination?
I'm really not understanding your point.
Genocide is the destruction of a group. The cide of a genos. Obviously killing 1 person, however motivated, isn't genocide. Obviously killing every single person in that group is genocide. Where you draw the lines in the middle is the question, I don't see what your little word games have to do with it.
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I've seen lots of anticipation of a ground operation, but very little in the way of what its actual goals would be. What would the IDF's success criteria be, short of "roll in and flatten any buildings that return fire until either an unconditional surrender is reached, or no buildings are left"? I don't think global opinion is going to give them quite that much of a leash. Are there specific targets they might want to get their
handsboots on?Something in line with their 2020 Decisive Victory doctrine.
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To wipe out the Gazans as a people while making it look like collateral damage.
Not an easy job given the shape of their population pyramid.
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Even unconditional surrender wouldn't help. Suppose the surviving leaders of Hamas surrender and actually honor it. In very short order you'll have some new organization appearing to continue the fight.
Aren't a lot of Hamas's leadership living abroad in Qatar, Turkey, and elsewhere?
Yes, but it is more important that they are irrelevant. If all of them were magicked out of existence, a replacement class of grifter-terrorists would quickly emerge to soak up aid money and attempt to kill Jews. The only solution is complete isolation of Gaza from all foreign aid for decades or total ethnic cleansing of either Gaza or Israel.
Gaza is already "ethnically cleansed". The word you're looking for is "genocide". I expect ethnically cleansing Israel (that is, moving all the Jews elsewhere) and giving the Palestinians their "river to sea" would probably work as far as Jews are concerned (they'd probably step up attacks on Lebanese and Egyptian Christians though, or just turn on other Muslim Arabs). Except you'd never get the Jews to agree.
No, I am perfectly happy shipping all of the populace of Gaza to China or Antarctica.
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If I search for "Palestinians killed by Israeli military" and set a limit on results no later than 10/1/2023 to keep the current war out, I see stories like these:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/20/middleeast/israeli-military-palestinians-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/22/middleeast/israeli-raid-nablus-west-bank-intl/index.html https://www.npr.org/2023/01/26/1151627428/palestinians-say-israeli-troops-kill-9-in-west-bank-raid
This smells like the stats on police killings in America. The ratio is very lopsided in favor of the trained professionals, which should not be at all surprising. Similarly, if the targets submitted to arrest, then there would be no lethal violence.
And "children" is conveniently ambiguous as teenagers are plenty capable of presenting themselves as a lethal threat.
I see your killings and raise you shooting at protestors:
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justification-israel-shoot-protesters-live-ammunition
We just saw what happens when Gazans aren’t stopped from breaking the border fence and going into Israel. I think live fire was fully justified, both at the time and in retrospect.
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They shot more than 6,000 people and only 183 died? What were they being shot with?
That’s about 33:1.
These ratios are similarly odd:
For comparison, Steven Paddock killed 60 and wounded 400, about 7.6:1. And he wasn’t even aiming at anyone in particular. The report says that protesters were shot by military snipers.
In addition, even the UN sheepishly admits that the protestors engaged in "significant violence" but that it doesn't technically constitute a "combat or military campaign". Hamas did what it always does: It deliberately mixes violent, dangerous offenders with children and other sympathetic victims, and when in the chaos the sympathethic victims are hurt, they go complain and pretend it's Israels fault. In comparison, Hamas goes into a village and deliberately executes children.
Where can I read about this from a credible source?
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The Israelis use .22 LR rifles as "less-lethal" weapons, IIRC. That's what's probably going on here.
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It's remarkable to me how often the comparison to 9/11 has been made here and in the broader conversation, yet nobody has ever bothered to carry that thought through to it's conclusion. Yes, the direct analogy where hundreds/thousands of Americans/Israelis were murdered by terrorists in their home countries is obvious. But why stop there and leave out the fact that the next twenty years saw a massive belligerent overcorrection and self-destructive wars abroad? Wars that nobody, even conservatives who presumably voted for Bush twice and raked Obama over the coals for being soft on terror/homeland security, will currently defend? It's all too easy to see a future where Israel will regret the actions it takes over the next few months as the entire nation is baying for Palestinian blood.
The local growing consensus around what is effectively genocide is also a mistake. Your personal DR pro-HBD/white supremacist bubbles are blinding you to what the normies think. If Israel 'does a genocide,' as people here have been saying, they're finished in the eyes of normies for at least a few decades. Not to mention the rank hypocrisy inherent in a nation and people who spent decades saying 'never again' will have changed their tune to 'never again, to us.'
The funniest thing about this entire debacle has been the overnight dissolution of the standard battle lines. Suddenly pro-Palestine leftist protestors flashing swastikas at Jews are shoulder-to-shoulder with stormfront White Nationalists. Center-left/center-right politicians and normies are largely united in condemning Hamas, hypocrisy around military aid and foreign interventionism be damned. Even here, there's a consensus that 'the media' is biased trash written by subhuman retards who were too low-IQ to code or do STEM in college, but half the comments claim they're bought and paid for by our Jewish overlords whilst the other half accuse them of institutional capture by pro-Palestinian leftists who will propagandize every civilian casualty due to a righteous freedom bomb dropped by the IDF. Neither bother to do a cursory check of the NYT cover page which would largely falsify both claims, but there's also nobody left to push back or call them on it.
Lest I be accused of being a dirty Muslim-loving commie anti-semite, I made the conscious decision to do my best to ignore Israel/Palestine over a decade ago after watching protestors rage at each other on a weekly basis at my college campus. Obligatory Hamas bad, rape and murder of civilians bad, what happened to innocent civilians in Israel was an atrocity, by all means go decapitate Hamas. But be careful in how far you go in the heat of the moment.
Good. Why should I shed a tear for the passing of ethnic favoritism in my home country? I'll take national unity over sinecures and in-grouping based on religion anyday.
Because our error was not extracting Afghani blood. There should not be a single tribesman ever associated with the Taliban alive today. The error of the US following 9/11 was caused by the same sort of people who sent out tweets from Biden admin accounts (SOS IIRC) calling for a ceasefire even before the raping in Israeli territory had stopped. Those people robbed us of victory in Afghanistan. The Y chromosome lineage in that country should look like there was a black death that affected only men. Baying for blood is not the problem, the problem is people who think that "civilians" actually exist in a theater where most of Hamas's military operations are based in schools, mosques, and hospitals.
The Taliban did not attack the United States. The leaders of the Taliban protected (and possibly assisted) the people who did. In hindsight, the US should have gone in, killed the incumbent Taliban leaders, held parts of the country long enough to kill the terrorists and destroy their camps (which was done early in the invasion, IIRC), and then left. Basically a massive punitive raid. Whoever took over afterwards would get the message that if you aid the enemies of the United States, the United States will kill you. (Said message could also be delivered by an actual diplomat if it didn't seem like the new leaders could connect the dots). No need to hold the place for decades.
Not nearly far enough.
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This sentence bothered me a lot, because I think it really hammers home that Ike Saul is drowning in both-sides-ism. There is a world where Israelis and Muslims and Jews live side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate: it's called "Israel." The 20% of Israel's citizens who are Palestinian Arabs are not the problem, here. Those Palestinians who turned their noses up at a single state solution put themselves (and their descendants) in the "box" Saul decries. Hamas does not want a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights. Only the Israelis want that. There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights.
It's amazing to watch people equivocate in their response to this single, incredibly hard truth. The reason Israelis tell you this is because all the evidence points to it being true. To say "there is no disputing" that Israelis killing innocents engenders rage, and yet mumble about crystal balls when it is pointed out that Hamas and their backers are fully committed to the extermination of Israel, is insane to me. Exactly one side of this conflict is openly genocidal, and it's not the Israelis. "Oh I agree that Hamas is evil but it's very important that we blame Israel even for that" is such a mind-boggling take, to me.
Lebanon, albeit it’s not exactly peaceful, would seem to fit the bill.
...how?
In July of 2020, Nagi Gergi Zeidan wrote, "Today, there are 29 Jews left in Lebanon — and they are all hiding." This does not appear to have changed.
To be completely clear, you think that absent persecution, a noticeable number of people entitled by law to live in Israel would continue to live in Lebanon?
Lebanon is not a peaceful society, and maintaining a large group membership seems pretty important for keeping yourself in that society, but multiple kinds of Christians and Muslims do in fact live side by side there, and do in fact have actual in practice equal rights there.
I have not said that, nor does that seem to me in any way relevant to the conversation. The standard set by the article was:
In the first place, "living side by side" connotes a measure of peace, which you acknowledge Lebanon lacks. In the second, the Jews living there clearly do not regard themselves as enjoying equal rights. "But some Christians do!" is not a refutation of any kind.
I do not know what you think to prove. You seem at best trying to pick a nit grounded in my paraphrasing, and yet even then you are doing it badly.
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Lebanon still has Christians, as does Egypt.
What do you think that gets you?
I'm mystified by this kind of response to my claim, which explicitly cribs the words of the article about "Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights." Suggesting countries that are neither noticeably diverse nor countries that are in any plausible way committed to equal rights does not meet the spirit of the original text. "Not counting expats, we have like, two or three different religious minorities in our country!" is, I grant, a kind of "diversity," but this is still not a cultural (much less jurisprudential) commitment to the kind of broad-spectrum liberal tolerance Westerners have in mind when they talk about diverse peoples living "side by side with equal rights."
"Lebanese Jews are afraid for their lives, but they do have Christians so technically they are a nation of diverse people living side by side" does not meet the standard of "Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights." And that's before addressing stuff like sex, sexuality, political freedom, and related concerns.
Which country would qualify this standard?
Jews usually have protected statuses in Western countries, with specific laws or law enforcement rules protecting them, social media companies having antisemitism-specific regulations and anti-antisemitism groups openly controlling their content... Meanwhile there are anti-muslims rules and laws against hijabs, mosque building, honor-killing, etc. It seems to me that it would be hard to say that muslims and jews have equal rights in the West.
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To add to this, it omits Christians, who have been ethnically cleansed from almost all of Israel's neighboring states to the extent that just glassing Gaza entirely would barely put Israel on par with them, but maybe not even on par.
Speaking of which, how are Gaza’s Christians doing? The rumors of St Porphyrius church getting blown up don’t appear to be true, but Christians in Gaza seem like they have better odds of convincing someone to take them in on the basis of ‘we’re not terrorists, just ruled by crazy people’.
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Quit your lying. The Israeli negotiating position at Oslo and Camp David was colossally disingenuous and offered terms nobody would accept.
They even admitted negotiations were a joke:
Meanwhile of course, the Israelis were busy adding new 'facts on the ground' like they've been doing the whole time.
If you don't negotiate honestly, in good faith, you won't get a diplomatic solution.
Oman? I invite you to substantiate this assertion further. And it's not like Israel's doing great at this either.
This simply isn't true, even putting to one side all the Muslims they've expelled and designated non-citizens. Taking Arab land and redistributing it to Israeli settlers for instance. Demolishing 100 times more Palestinian houses than they let them build. Refusing to let Arabs, Israeli citizens or not, live in several hundred Israeli small towns. Restrictions on freedom of speech, assembly and movement.
The Israelis clearly don't want a country where Jews and Muslims live side by side, they want a country where Jews are on top, they take action to achieve it and they've enshrined it into law:
Pro-Israel people should base their arguments on the rule of force because they don't really have a leg to stand on in terms of morality.
@naraburns might not have modded you for calling him a liar, but I will.
No matter how strongly you feel about someone's opinion, you may not personally attack people, and calling someone a liar is definitely a personal attack. If you genuinely believe someone is lying, you'd better be able to make a very solid case for that beyond "Your opinion is wrong and bad." You aren't a mind-reader, so the bar for accusing someone of lying is very high, and I suggest you don't try.
I don't feel like I've ever seen this rule enforced before.
Example.
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We have definitely modded people for calling other posters liars before.
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I have not said anything known to me to be untrue, and I find this level of antagonism as surprising as it is unwarranted.
Oman? This Oman? I see no indication that their country qualifies as a counterexample.
As for Israel, I have nothing to say in defense of Israel's own errors. That they are the sole liberal democracy in the Middle East is not an assertion that they are perfect, or even that they are good. I find none of this relevant to any of the statements I made in my previous post. I think @Pasha makes an interesting counterclaim that the 20% Arab population of Israel is being deliberately limited to that in order to preserve the Jewish state, that seems plausible to me. But it is still substantially more tolerant of Arabs and Muslims, than any sharia-oriented country is of Jews. You mentioned Oman, the first sentence of this Wikipedia page is worth chewing on:
Anyway, I think maybe you've confused me for someone else, or something, because most of what you've written here is entirely beside the point. I am not pro-Israel in any meaningful sense of the words. But I am very, very anti-Hamas, to say nothing of their bloodthirsty paymasters.
Later sentences in the same article:
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Agreed on your last paragraph strongly. She wrote a lot of words that basically said she had no solutions. And in all the rambling she said the right answer and rejected it. As long as that is true there really isn’t a solution. The correct thing to do with a homicidal criminal is to put them in prison. And everything seems to indicate it’s not that bad of prison.
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The reason a "one-state" solution is impossible is that the current arrangement can only be maintained as long as that ratio doesn't go above 20%-ish (which includes various groups more sympathetic to Israel like Christian Arabs and Druzes). If there was a real one-state, it would not be a functional democracy and certainly not a Jewish one, which is the point of Zionism in the first place. There has never been any doubt that Zionists will not give Arabs political rights unless if they are small enough to not be threatening. Israel purposefully crafted its citizenship laws to exclude vast majority of Arabs, and only expanded the citizenship status slowly and to small groups once Jewish immigration meant that this would not alter the voting population much. It is extremely hypocritical to pretend this is not true and somehow non-Israel passport holder Arabs could get equal political rights if only they wanted. Even in best case scenario (where peace and friendship between the peoples are established by magic tomorrow), this would never be accepted by Israel as there are not enough Jews left in the world to immigrate and keep up the population ratio in Jews' favor.
What is that evidence exactly? West Bank is defanged and as a result it is rapidly being invaded by Jewish settlements inflicting death by thousand cuts to the already tiny Arab ghettoes. And this happens even while Arabs are very much sticking to their guns. Not to mention that the far-right is rapidly taking over Israeli politics. These people are the future.
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