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naraburns  nihil supernum  7mo ago (text post)   28919 thread views

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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How do we assess how much of the Gazan population supports Hamas, or at least this conflict?

They won their only election with 44% of the vote and haven’t held any since. I keep hearing people say they hold supermajority support but the most recent polls I see, conducted on 500 people, show a more mixed bag:

According to the latest Washington Institute polling, conducted in July 2023, Hamas’s decision to break the ceasefire was not a popular move. While the majority of Gazans (65%) did think it likely that there would be “a large military conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza” this year, a similar percentage (62%) supported Hamas maintaining a ceasefire with Israel. Moreover, half (50%) agreed with the following proposal: “Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction, and instead accept a permanent two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.” Moreover, across the region, Hamas has lost popularity over time among many Arab publics. This decline in popularity may have been one of the motivating factors behind the group’s decision to attack.

In fact, Gazan frustration with Hamas governance is clear; most Gazans expressed a preference for PA administration and security officials over Hamas—the majority of Gazans (70%) supported a proposal of the PA sending “officials and security officers to Gaza to take over the administration there, with Hamas giving up separate armed units,” including 47% who strongly agreed. Nor is this a new view—this proposal has had majority support in Gaza since first polled by The Washington Institute in 2014.

Nevertheless, there is widespread popular appeal for competing armed Palestinian factions, including those involved in the attack. Overall, 57% of Gazans express at least a somewhat positive opinion of Hamas—along with similar percentages of Palestinians in the West Bank (52%) and East Jerusalem (64%)—though this is fewer than those who support Fatah (64%).

Even the 57% positive opinion may be an overestimate, given that other polls show 75% of Gazans are afraid to criticize Hamas.

I have no idea how credible these polls are, or where other people’s numbers about supermajority support come from, this is mostly an open question.

What’s the ethnoreligious makeup of Gaza vs hamas’s support? Shia vs Sunni vs Christian seems like the axis Arabs organize themselves along in diverse societies.

Almost all Arab muslims in Gaza, Judea and Samaria are Sunni. Some in Islamic Jihad had converted to Shia following their Iranian supporters, but that’s about it as far as I know. Christians have been pretty much cleansed from Gaza, there are less than 2,000 remaining.

I must’ve been getting wires crossed with hezbollah because I thought there were lots of Shiites involved.

There are, they’re just in Iran and in Lebanon, like you said.

At least from their wiki Gaza is 99% Sunni. There used to be more Palestinian Christians but a lot of them left during 48 and from the years after.

All the polling is clever, but ultimately irrelevant to the people citing Hamas' supposed popular support. I suspect that the logic of punishing civilians in Gaza for the crimes of their leadership is primarily Randian

As a broader philosophical matter, Rand judged that “anyone who wants to invade a dictatorship or semi-dictatorship is morally justified in doing so, because he is doing no worse than what that country has accepted as its social system.” Her rationale on World War II and Vietnam was based on the view that since American lives weren’t threatened, it would be wrong to go on a crusade on behalf of foreigners. Later in life, Rand weighed in on the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Appearing on the Phil Donahue show in 1979, Rand was asked what she thought of U.S. policy in the Middle East. She replied that the American government should side with Israel against Palestinians because, in her words, Israel was the “advanced, technological, civilized country” in the dispute, squared off against “a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years and who are racist and who resent Israel because it is bringing industry, and intelligence, and modern technology into their stagnation.”

Donahue pushed back, arguing that the Palestinians were in a terrible spot, and asking if she wasn’t too one-sided. Rand responded by saying that since the Arabs “go around murdering … innocent women and children … that’s what makes me condemn and despise them.”

Curiously, though, Rand also wrote that there was no reason to distinguish between innocent civilians from military targets. For her, there was no such thing when it came to citizens of enemy countries.

If by neglect, ignorance, or helplessness, they couldn’t overthrow their bad government and establish a better one, then they must pay the price for the sins of their government, as we are all paying for the sins of ours.

The citizens of Gaza, under such a view, are responsible at a level of primordial democracy: if they truly objected to living under a genocidal Islamist dictatorship, really truly objected with the ferocity requisite to such a belief, they would rebel and overthrow that government. Not just the right to rebel against an unjust government, but the responsibility to do so.

This is not totally irrational in the Gazan case, since we do see other armed organizations pop up to resist Hamas from an even more extreme Islamist position- such as Islamic Jihad.

What do the Jihadists want that Hamas doesn't provide?

More fighting, all the time, no matter what. Unlike Hamas which does believe the in a tactical truce now and then.

Also, IIRC Jihad started its ties with Iran earlier than Hamas (which is more Muslim Brotherhood affiliated), and some have even converted from Sunni to Shia.

Power and prestige for the Jihadis and their friends, rather than Hamas officials.

This is also the view of OBL. American civilians voted for the government that had soldiers in Saudi Arabia. For that reason, OBL thought it allowable to kill American civilians.

You're missing a key difference, under Rand's view voting has nothing to do with it. Merely choosing to live under a wicked government is sufficient consent to sign your death warrant. One must martyr oneself for freedom, one revolts and wins or dies; if you do not revolt you do not deserve mercy or consideration.

Hm. I'd be curious what you think Rand's view toward e.g. Native Americans vs the USA would be (or if you know if she ever wrote on that). Were Native American raids on soft targets justified? The USA circa 1800 was very plausibly less free on net than Native American societies; when they scalped and murdered unarmed American citizens, was that just giving what was due to them, as a people upholding an expansionary state with a particularly brutal form of slavery?

There could certainly be a back and forth about which society was worse, but I guess that gets at my objections to Rand's point: it can be deployed by anyone against anyone. If your enemy is worse than you, you can justify anything against anyone governed by them. Indeed, that's the justification for the Hamas attacks: the people they murdered de facto supported the existence of the state of Israel, denying their responsibility to install a just Islamic state from river to sea.

Rand's view on Native Americans was... not great: like a lot of pre-1970s Americans she largely saw them as primitive and nomadic tribal groups that hadn't really developed a concept of properties rights or technological advancement. The modern Objectivist analysis holds that some of this falls from often-bad scholarship of the time, which obscured a lot of Native American social technologies, but I'd expect she'd still find them to have failed her techno-utopian vision.

That said, Author Bloom's summary of Rand's position during the Donahue interview isn't very accurate. See here for a transcript, where behind the ellipsis we instead see :

No. I don’t resort to terrorism. I don’t go around murdering my opponents, innocent women and children. That is what I have against the Arabs. That takes the conflict out of the sphere of civilized conflict, and makes it murderous. And anyone, private citizens, who resort to force is a monster. And, that’s what makes me condemn and despise them.

I don't think she ever wrote specifically on the exact bounds of "civilized conflict", but a few of her books touched on her conflicts with 'just war' theory. Most interpretations become... idiosyncratic, to say the least, but I don't think Bloom's "no reason to distinguish between innocent civilians from military targets" is an honest read.

There could certainly be a back and forth about which society was worse, but I guess that gets at my objections to Rand's point: it can be deployed by anyone against anyone. If your enemy is worse than you, you can justify anything against anyone governed by them.

Yep, the justification for war and murder of civilians because they are more technologically 'progressed' as well is frankly ridiculous, IMO. Especially given as you say many less technologically powerful societies on the surface level have had much higher quality of life and were better among many axes.

Hell, if we didn't wipe out 95% of the Native American population with smallpox, they likely would've been able to fend of the Europeans indefinitely.

Perhaps this is obvious, but that view actually makes me much less sympathetic to any grievances someone may have against the US.

The philosophy of a long dead, Jewish Russian author whose objectivism is a minority within the broader ancap/libertarian US political movement that itself is a minority within the American rightwing coalition influences your level of sympathy for issues with the US?

No, I meant if terrorists abroad are going to consider me, someone that was a teenager on 9/11, morally culpable for what the US government does and a valid target, that makes me much more war hawkish in general.

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