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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.

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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 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.

There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights

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.

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.

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?

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.

@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.

We have definitely modded people for calling other posters liars before.

Quit your lying.

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.