naraburns nihil supernum
7mo 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.
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 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.
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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.
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 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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