naraburns nihil supernum
1yr 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.
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
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2rafa 1yr 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?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
VoxelVexillologist 1yr ago
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.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
anti_dan 1yr ago
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.
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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.
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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