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.
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
One of the most edifying experiences of my youth was an academic assignment in the GWOT era, when we were instructed to pick a terrorist group and study its formation and evolution. I knew everyone else would pick something Islamic, so I decided to pick something else to stand out, and I settled on Sri Lanka. For about 33 years (1976 to 2009), Sri Lanka saw a brutal civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, where the two sides could be neatly demarcated into separate ethnicities, separate religions, and separate languages - not dissimilar to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Tamils were represented by the LTTE, which was a terrorist organization and a separatist group seeking to carve out an ethnostate from Tamil-dominated regions of the country. But the LTTE was also a remarkably sophisticated pseudo-state; most terrorist organizations don't have their own navy, air force, or intelligence apparatus, which are all things that the LTTE put together during their war against the Sri Lankan state.
I won't rehash the disputes and grievances of the war, since they are predictable and your imagination can reliably fill in the details from what you know of other ethnic conflicts, including the one in Israel. All race wars are eventually the same. Long story short is that tens of thousands of people died on both sides, and numerous foreign actors including the US, Norway, India, the EU, and the UN tried to intervene and broker a peace, and the conflict settled into a cycle of atrocities->diplomacy->ceasefires->new atrocities->new diplomacy->new ceasefires, on and on. And then in late 2006, the Sri Lankan government essentially said "fuck this", and decided to wage concentrated, merciless, full-throated war against the Tamils. They brought out the kinds of heavy weapons that you usually reserve for wars against foreign states, and they used them without hesitation, and with very little regard for civilian-combatant distinctions. They killed and killed and killed until the LTTE was begging for a ceasefire, which they ignored, and then kept killing until the LTTE was ground into the dirt, their leadership massacred, their leaderships' families massacred, everything destroyed - until the LTTE had no capacity to fight or do anything anymore, at which point the Sri Lankans declared victory, and the war was over.
None of this was "legal" or "ethical" or "moral". Countless crimes against humanity were committed. But the war was over, and has shown no signs of returning in the almost 15 years since its conclusion. No more bombs in public places, no more midnight massacres on farms and villages, no more burning streets. What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer. But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem. We used to know these things - all the population transfers and ethnic cleaning that took place after World War I and World War II were done with the understanding that you cannot expect certain groups to coexist in the same space peacefully for long, and that an atrocity in the present may prevent a greater atrocity in the future. We pretend to know better now, and to what end? To keep money flowing to NGOs, and hand out peace prizes to each other?
I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer. But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem.
Israel would not have this specific problem of Hamas launching attacks from Gaza (that up until now, had been quite comfortably handled). But they might have other problems: a revival of pan-Arabism, a withdrawal of US and western support, the fervent determination of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and maybe Egypt to pursue development of nuclear weapons, etc.
Brutal, overwhelming force might solve one problem, but if in the process that creates three more, you are no farther ahead than when you started.
Israel has long-term plans. God, after all, has promised them the Holy Land, and they see a long-term way to achieve it. Incrementally expanding settlements in the West Bank every year and fighting off a spirited attempt from Hezbollah/Hamas once a decade might be a slow way, but so far it looks like a sure way. They no longer face an existential threat. They've mollified and bought off their formal rivals, and in the process surpassed them. They have ironclad security guarantees and economic support from the world's most powerful countries. Why risk all of that?
Part of what I think makes Palestine different is that they have hundreds of millions of other Arabs and other muslims supporting them. Once the Tamils were broken, they were broken- they had no path to recovery. But for Palestine, every single member of Hamas could suffer from heart attacks and die tomorrow, and all the weapons could be confiscated, but I don’t think the conflict would be permanently over. Because other groups who want to see Israel ended and Palestine established would work to recreate Hamas or a similar group, providing funding and weapons.
Part of what I think makes Palestine different is that they have hundreds of millions of other Arabs and other muslims supporting them. Once the Tamils were broken, they were broken- they had no path to recovery.
What about 70 million Indian Tamils, why didn't they support the LTTE?
Local Indian Tamil politicians occasionally campaigned on their behalf, and India even armed them in the 80s. It was India intervening as a peacekeeping force later that made the LTTE turn against them, culminating in the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, at which point the LTTE found itself pretty much friendless, with even their coethnics largely unwilling to touch them with a ten foot pole.
This feels 10-30 years dated. I don’t get the sense anyone besides a few poors give a shit about Israel in the Middle East now.
Iran and Saudis probably have a few who care but not a majority. Iran cares because a Saudi plus Israel partnership is extremely strong as a regional hegemon. And getting Israel to overreact might cause some issues for the Saudis. Those who care in Saudi society can probably ignored it so long as there are too many dead Palestinians.
I think you underestimate the amount of grass roots support for Palestine. Look at all the protests in Western countries in support of Palestine, before Israel even launched a counter-offensive. A lot of Muslims want to see a free Palestine and want to effectively remove Israel.
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
I've long felt that people who talk this way of such things have never engaged with war closer than playing a Paradox game.
What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
Very true, which is why I support the genocide of all landlords and capitalists because they stand in the way of the socialist utopia and would just keep trying to destroy it if we left them alive. In fact, I might even extend this to genociding all humans because they can't stop polluting the earth.
No one is denying that if you kill anyone who opposes you, you can stop fighting instead of continuing a protracted engagement that drains resources and willpower. What is denied is that this is a moral thing to do. Ending war is not inherently a moral good. To have it as a terminal value is the same mistake the pacifists make when they insist the West should voluntarily disarm or leave the Soviets/Russians alone.
In fact, if I was going to be more cynical, I would guess that for some people, any solution to a problem is better than having to keep hearing about it, as if the real sin is that they were asked to pay attention to something other than their own lives. Funny how this forum would reject that idea if it were leftists calling for a ban on anything that cast black people in a negative light because that is a way of fighting racism.
And what of all the similar conflicts which were resolved without engaging in full-throated war? Northern Ireland is an obvious example. More importantly, this claim:
you cannot expect certain groups to coexist in the same space peacefully for long
an atrocity in the present may prevent a greater atrocity in the future.
That is a great argument for assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, but not so great for killing all 2 million residents of the Gaza Strip, "everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers," in order to avoid 600 deaths of Israelis, or even 60,000. Because the latter is not a "greater atrocity" than the former.
A false dichotomy, because I'm pretty sure OP isn't proposing the killing of literally every Palestinian in Gaza, but only the option of killing Hamas, politically involved activists, and optionally, some of their families. I'd be immensely surprised if even that latter broader case encompassed anywhere near a million, maybe twenty or thirty thousand at most before people learned they needed to shut up.
The relevant calculus of death is (Israeli and Palestinian military and civilians who would die if the conflict was allowed to keep boiling) versus (The same class if a brutal campaign ended all appetite for further organized activity).
It seems eminently obvious to me that the former is comparable to the latter, if only because a ton of Palestinians already die because of Hamas provoking Israel.
Then, of course, a more rigorous approach considers second order effects. Of which there are multitudes.
I'm pretty sure OP isn't proposing the killing of literally every Palestinian in Gaza,
I'm pretty sure OP is proposing precisely that, since OP said, "But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem."
the Sri Lankan government essentially said "fuck this", and decided to wage concentrated, merciless, full-throated war against the Tamils. They brought out the kinds of heavy weapons that you usually reserve for wars against foreign states, and they used them without hesitation, and with very little regard for civilian-combatant distinctions. They killed and killed and killed until the LTTE was begging for a ceasefire, which they ignored,
That is on top of the quote I already cited, re "killing everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers,"
And they also say this: "I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer."
The bottom line is that if there is evidence that OP in fact would not have endorsed the killing of every Sri Lankan Tamil, had that been necessary, I would like to see it. OP is clearly endorsing that very idea.
I took it to mean that it would be a sufficient solution, at the time, but without any implication that it was necessary today, where far less than the utter annihilation of the Palestinian people will more than suffice.
I'll let him clarify his stance, if he wishes, but just because someone said Genocide X years ago would solve Y problem today, that doesn't mean they're suggesting the very same for Y today.
I don't mind it, honestly. But if some level of ethnic cleansing that falls short of total genocide would be an effective solution, then sure, go for that instead. It's worked out plenty of times in the past. What I object to is this idea that everything on that spectrum of atrocities, from population transfers to mass graves, should be declared off-limits.
Another example would be the Dayton Agreement in the Bosnian War, which specifically established a (creaky, unwieldy) state combining the two recently-slaughtering-each-other national units under one state. Sure, people have predict almost annually that this is the year when it comes to an end and B-H cracks, but it's still standing, remarkably.
To be fair, B-H has a long history of being shoved together under the same imperial suzerain (Ottomans, Habsburgs, Yugoslav communists, etc.) And I'm not sure what, other than pride, would be incentivizing renewed fighting today.
Just last week there was the police killing/monastery shootout. And the completely unrelated armor, artillery and mechanized border deployment that undeployed for reasons unrelated to international condemnation. Last year was the fight over license plates. Still standing though.
Heck, even the end of WWII didn't necessitate the Carthage-like destruction of Germany or Japan. The Allies stated their terms seeking (with very limited exceptions) unconditional surrender, and kept fighting until they got it. The Battle of Berlin was tremendously bloody and maybe even cruel, but seems to have marked a decided tipping point in how the German government (both, for several generations) would act toward Jews, Poles, and Russians. Post-war Japan looks very different from it's Imperial days. Neither people was totally wiped from the face of the Earth.
Of course, if Total Military Defeat were to consistently cause such actions, more recent attempts at such "nation building" would have been more successful. I wish I could say that OPs view is completely wrong, but I can't. It's morally reprehensible, and I really don't like it, but does seem to work sometimes.
W/R/T Germany it did mean the expulsion and resettlement (with significant casualties from hunger, exposure, disease, and criminal predation) of over 10 million ethnic Germans living throughout eastern and central Europe. See, e.g. R. M. Douglas' Orderly and Humane (2013) - just a couple years before a similar, though smaller-scale and less thorough version of the same policy was enacted upon arab residents of the nascent state of Israel in what Palestinians call the nakba, or "catastrophe."
I think OP's argument is that the Israeli fault lies in being less thorough in expelling arabs from a defensible perimeter than the allies and communists were with Germans in eastern europe. I am sympathetic to this argument, though it makes me uncomfortable to admit that, and understand that there are significant differences in the two situations - the arab/palestinian refugees would not have had major military occupations or "Marshall Plan"-style aid as the Germans did, and the strategic situation of Germany (divided in half between the west and the commies, stuck in a geographically-vulnerable middle position) does not describe the strategic geography of the Middle East at all.
I think you might want to review what actually happened in Carthage. Though I suspect that if you consider denazification to be akin to mass slaughter, you are likely pushing an agenda rather than engaging seriously with the issue at hand.
I don't think it's comparable, because the British weren't signing a treaty with the IRA. Ireland had a fully-developed spectrum of normal political parties and civil organizations, and they signed the Good Friday Agreement as a reflection of the overwhelming popular desire for peace. After that, any Irish group that wanted further conflict would lack a credible basis to do so. Who are you supposed to talk to in Gaza? Hamas is the only authority there, and the population's views are more aligned with Hamas than peace advocates would care to admit. Peace is nice if you can get it, but when the other side doesn't want it (and probably couldn't agree to it even if they wanted to, being an Iranian proxy), there's not really any solution besides a total purge.
I don't think it's comparable, because the British weren't signing a treaty with the IRA.
They were, Sinn Féin were a party to the treaty and it couldn't have worked without their participation. Britain signing a deal with Ireland alone wouldn't have changed anything as the Irish state didn't represent nationalists in Northern Ireland nor exert any control over the paramilitaries.
Ukraine anshlussed on generous terms is better for Ukrainians than battered and destroyed Ukraine folded into the Russian state that has lost couple of million of their best people due to emigration or war casualties.
I have not seen shred of evidence that Russia entered the war with genocidal ambitions which doesn't make it that existential for the populace, unlike the state.
If you make the assumption that Russian victory in the meatgrinder is inevitable (big if, but Zelensky is doing his best to make it smaller lately) it is not unreasonable.
Even Ukrainian victory may not be worth it if it is pyrrhic enough.
"Ukraine anshlussed" is going to lead to millions of Ukrainians emigrating in any case, and would be a bleeding wound with continuous partisan activity that would require Russia continous brutality to quell.
Would you apply the same logic to Palestine? I don’t mean this as a gotcha; I was observing above that “one side’s unilateral surrender” is something that gets floated in every conflict. At least every one where the people dying are at a safe distance.
I'm not pro-Russia (who here is?) but yes Ukraine should seek peace and concede territory if necessary. I have little doubt that this would minimize human suffering.
The counterargument seems to be something along the lines of "We need teach Russia a lesson so they won't do it again. Remember Munich!"
Which is silly. Russia lacks the capacity to do it again.
I find the arguments of the warmongers very unconvincing. The use of the pejorative "pro-Russia" to describe those who would have peace feels like manufacturing consensus.
Which is silly. Russia lacks the capacity to do it again.
Even in my wildest anti-Russian fantasies do I not believe that Russia, if given a peace and concessions instead of some kind of "a lesson", would lack the capacity to do it again.
Exactly, if the war ceases right now at the current lines, Russia's ability to rearm stays constant or improves (as sanctions loosen or their enforcement becomes more lax). Ukraine's drops precipitously off a cliff as Western support evaporates. Ukraine needs Russia to see the invasion as being routed and done, not merely paused, because Russia will find itself in a more advantageous position in the future, and Ukraine needs the mental barrier of "starting a war of aggression on a neighbor" to be back in place, preferably with a little extra bracing from that neighbor having kicked their asses, to hope it doesn't get restarted again.
There are atleastafewaround. More if you count the ones who gesture at how terrible Russia’s actions are only as a justification for telling Ukraine to surrender.
I don’t think “pro-Russia” is a pejorative any more than “pro-Ukraine.”
But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem.
You would have many other exciting problems. I doubt that mass murder of X million people is actually effective.
Hitler tried, and as far as curbing Jewish political power and influence, or as increasing power of Germany, or as taking Lebensraum, or as promoting eugenics and purity of german race - all that goals failed miserably. Despite actually murdering millions of people.
Germans were thrown out of lots of territories post-WWII
Mostly as a revenge for Germans themselves attempting to conquer and settle into their neighbors' territories. Am I the only one who sees Germans as more analogous to the other side in this conflict?
I don't think Israel needs to literally kill everyone, but they do need to institute some sort of radical de-Palestinization. Go in, establish total martial law, destroy all mosques, convert the entire population to Bnei Noach, ban the Arabic language. These people got self-government and immediately voted a literal terrorist cell into power. Israel has no reason to treat Gaza any more leniently that the Allies treated Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.
I wonder if modern communication and widespread prevalence of Islam will lead this to be less effective than your examples.
Like with Nazi Germany, the main source of Nazi ideology was Germany itself: if you wanted to learn about Naziism you had to go up against the occupation authorities that were against that. And even if there were Nazi groups that weren't repressed in Italy or something, you'd have a hard time finding and learning from them.
But that's clearly not going to happen here: Islam exists in many countries across the world and will explicitly talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict, so there's always going to be a supply of Islam for anyone in Palestine who wants to learn it.
Keeping it repressed doesn't just mean tearing down the mosques, it means keeping Palestinians from accessing the mosques in other countries, which would mean an unrealistic crackdown on all communication technology in the country, and probably needing to maintain that crackdown perfectly for decades against people from other countries actively seeking to break it.
There are further differences that seem to support your theory.
Nazism was also denounced by practically the entire world, or at least by those parts of it that had much influence. Since Islam counts as a religion and all parts of the world that have much influence have agreed that religions require protection, Islam receives protection in most of the world whereas Nazism did not.
The other very obvious difference is that Nazism had maybe a decade to take root, whereas Islam has had a good 1300 years. Nobody but a handful of German children, and those only briefly, experienced Nazism as a natural fact of life, whereas Islam is in the soil and water of much of the world.
The two don't really compare at all. So I'd agree with you.
On the other hand... Japan surrendered to the US! How were the Japanese able to swallow their pride in the face of total nuclear annihilation and decide that bending their knee to the West and adopting all of their customs was better than going down in a blaze of glory? But yet the Palestinians find this utterly unthinkable?
After that, though ... was the institution of the Japanese Emperor a blessing in disguise? Anti-terrorist tactics consider "decapitation strikes" killing enemy leaders to be high-value goals, but if there's nobody left at the top who's respected enough to order the foot soldiers to stand down then ipso facto the foot soldiers never stand down. From a moral standpoint it feels like assassinating a "mastermind" is greater justice than killing tons of poor grunts who merely got persuaded or coerced onto the front lines, but maybe the rules of war are more useful in the long run than the rules of anti-terrorism, if wars can come to an end but terrorism just goes on and on?
The Japanese were not displaced from their homeland and only temporarily lost control of Japan after their defeat. The Palestinians lost both their homes and control of Palestine permanently.
The emperor surrendered unilaterally against the wishes of his advisors. There is no god emperor in Gaza to make the Palestinians surrender against popular sentiment.
I’d guess it’s because Japan’s entire people were on the line, whereas Hamas identifies with other Arabs/Muslims such that the loss of Palestine doesn’t mean total defeat.
If they managed to find some countries that were willing to take in millions of Palestinians, the Israelis maybe would be able to pull off a soft ethnic cleansing. But they could not pull off a murderous, "kill everybody" genocide without alienating a very large fraction of their current supporters, including Jewish ones. Israel would become similar to what North Korea is today. It would probably not collapse, but it would have big difficulties in retaining nearly as many high-skilled, intelligent people as it has now unless it made it illegal for them to leave the country, and it would have bigger difficulties in convincing Jews from elsewhere to move there than it does now. Only the most hardcore patriots would want to live in an armed camp that is known for having recently committed one of modern history's biggest genocides, and I doubt that the overlap between such hardcore patriots and the kind of high-skilled, intelligent people who are the bedrock of any sophisticated modern economy is very large. Which is not to say that there are no intelligent pro-genocide people, of course. There are plenty. But they are an exception. In the heat of the moment after having had your nation attacked, almost anyone could feel genocidal desire. I think it's likely that a huge number of otherwise compassionate Israelis feel that way right now, for example. But there's a difference between feeling it every now and then and actually being ok with your military doing it and seeing the videos of what it looks like. Even the Nazis tried to keep the Holocaust a secret from both Germans and people in other countries, but in today's world there would be no way to keep a violent genocide of Palestinians a secret.
Ethnic cleansing was done before, even with tacit agreement of USA. One such example is Operation Storm that took place on the tail end of Balkan Wars, where Croats basically ethnically cleansed the area that was the stronghold of autonomous republic of Serbs. Croats killed several hundreds of Serbs and basically evicted hundreds of thousands from their land.
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
There's good reason that Britain pacified Afghanistan in the 19th century with far weaker supply chains and less glaring technological disparities, while it and the rest of NATO left in the 21st with their tail tucked between their legs.
Violence is the voice of the unheard, but it's also a universal language. If you can't solve most problems with violence, you're not using enough, and quite often, or at least here, a more dispassionate analysis will show that a quick burst of brutal violence obviates the need for more down the line.
At any rate, I think Western countries are cowardly in large part because most of the wars they've fought of late don't matter, lacking the stakes of their populations being genocided or living conditions cratering.
Yes, there is really no war that cannot be won by killing enough of the enemy. Only the number that counts as ‘enough’ and the precise definition of ‘enemy’ vary. Less than 2000 American soldiers died in Afghanistan, it simply wasn’t a serious war. More Israelis have likely died since Saturday.
I find it ironic that you prefer the Israeli way of doing things that excludes you while you want to migrate to the west which if it followed the logic you praise, would rightfully exclude you from it.
But your logic in favor of nationalist violence implies far more besides that. Lets just say your general stance is completely incoherent. Is nationalist violence good when the Israelis do it only, or do you secretly find the west stupid for not being more hostile to you? Although the implications of your rhetoric of more violence no problems raises far more negative implications about what global powers should do. Or even specific countries fearing a dismal fate for their people in the future. Or should have done in the past.
I don't actually agree but I do think enough force and hostility is needed against those who deserve it and to promote civilization and justice. But adoring violence as the solution is wrongheaded and leads to a world under fire and predation of inoccents. Which you show no concern to avoiding. Obviously not letting someone with your backstabbing mentality come to the west would be the sane course. And stopping mass migration of foreigners in general. Which is good in general. But say some white nationalist when India had no nukes wanting to nuke India because they sew it as a threat would be an extremely immoral conduct.
I fail to see any sincere philosophical appreciation for violence and tribalism here. Rather, you are sucking up to Jewish ultra-nationalism.
I find it ironic that you prefer the Israeli way of doing things that excludes you while you want to migrate to the west which if it followed the logic you praise, would rightfully exclude you from it.
Not in the least, since I intend to go through legal channels as about the most Westernized an Indian can get, contributing to a valuable profession, and generally being prosocial. My idle musings about my potential path to American citizenship, should it ever materialize, was met with almost unanimous approval from pretty much every side of the political compass, be it here or on Reddit.
Can you say the same for the typical Palestinian? Hardly.
Is nationalist violence good when the Israelis do it only, or do you secretly find the west stupid for not being more hostile to you?
Case by case please. Certainly no to the latter, since they would be turning down a win-win deal.
I fail to see any sincere philosophical appreciation for violence and tribalism here. Rather you are sucking up to Jewish nationalism.
Ah yes, you (might) have genuine appreciation for the Palestinian cause, I suck up to the Jews. Well, if Mossad wants to pay me, I'll take it, I'm circumcized for medical reasons, but close enough! I am hardly uncritical of the Jews as a whole, given that they formented much of Western Wokism despite it now biting them in the ass.
I made no claim to show "sincere philosophical appreciation for violence and tribalism" at all, so you're forgiven for missing it.
What I am saying is that I prefer the outcome of Israeli dominion and pacification of the contested territories, and I don't particularly care about how they go about it. I do not think violence is anti-sacred and verboten, it's just as fungible as most things are as far as I'm concerned. Tribalism? If you deny that Jews, even those in Israel, have contributed much more to the globe than all their neighbors put together, then sure, you can abuse the term.
Please try to look for more subtle arguments than those before you claim that support for a particular nation engaging in violence and "tribalism" extends to universal adulation of such. It all depends on the outcome.
Not in the least, since I intend to go through legal channels as about the most Westernized an Indian can get, contributing to a valuable profession, and generally being prosocial.
Why should I, as an American, give you the benefit of that doubt? Why shouldn't I just assume that you're some basket-weaver taking a shit on the streets of Calcutta, or fresh from participating in a gang rape in some rural village? There are over one billion Indians and I'd bet very few of them are pro-Western doctors. Why are you privileged to paint all Palestinians with a broad brush, but I'm not privileged to paint all Indians with a broad brush?
You can give me whatever you like, it matters not in the least unless you're my immigration officer.
Besides, while I'm just as fond of rhetoric as the next person, I'm pretty certain you know that's not true.
And if it's not true, then I suggest you wait till evidence arises that I'm street-shitting in California and not Calcutta, though the former is a cherished pan-American tradition practised by junkies and hobos of any ethnicity. Surprising few Indians among them, to be sure, but if that's not additional reason to support Affirmative Action in immigration to mitigate disparities, what is?
You're missing the point. If you're advocating that Palestinians should be painted with a broad brush based on their worst stereotypes, then why shouldn't Indians be given the same treatment? Your argument presupposes I treat you as an individual, while you want to deny such treatment to any individual from Gaza.
Am I? I have very little outright animosity against a Palestinian who doesn't support Hamas, I think it's a shame they're caught up in the conflict. Yet clearly they're not numerous or vocal enough to be in charge, or they'd have chased them out of town after tarring and feathering them.
For what it's worth, I don't think Israeli reprisals are utterly indiscriminate, while innocents will be caught in the crossfire, I expect those who die to be selected from Hamas than their allies far more than a random sampling would expect. The friends and family being blown up with a Hamas terrorist are significantly more likely to be sympathizers. As for hospitals and schools, with a captive population, perhaps Hamas should reconsider stashing their ammunition there, in a calculated move to curry international favor when Israel blows them up.
Evidently that's enough for me to look the other way, or even cheer for the Israelis. I deny that your analogy works at all really.
Why shouldn't I just assume that you're some basket-weaver taking a shit on the streets of Calcutta, or fresh from participating in a gang rape in some rural village?
Because that would be unnecessarily antagonistic, which is against the rules.
By way of explanation, I was trying to highlight the most uncharitable view of his countrymen that I could think of in order to illustrate a point. I tend to be pro-Israel, but the repeated calls on this board for treating every Gazan as a Hamas terrorist up to the point of advocating for summary execution without evidence or even requirement of specific wrongdoing based on the assumption that all of them are predisposed towards violence rubs me the wrong way. While I understand there's a difference between making broad statements about groups on the other side of the world and actually singling out individual posters, one of my problems with the more racist-leaning elements on this board is that advocating for certain policies is easy when you assume that only other people will be affected by them. I don't put @self_made_human into this category, nor do I assume he is of the character I alluded to. The comment certainly wasn't intended to offend, but I believe I have more contact with actual hoi polloi working-class conservatives than the average poster here, and I can assure you that the kind of people who take the position he's advocating for are the same kind of people who refuse to patronize gas stations owned by Indians and Pakistanis and complain about local Nepali refugees meditating on their lawns. Anyway, I apologize.
the repeated calls on this board for treating every Gazan as a Hamas terrorist up to the point of advocating for summary execution without evidence or even requirement of specific wrongdoing
Well, there are, uh, a lot of posts happening on this topic so I apologize if this sort of thing is genuinely slipping through. I don't see every comment that gets reported, and there are other moderators, but I, at least, have yet to see a single comment in the queue that meets this description, even though I've seen several comments in the queue claiming that this sentiment is being expressed here, somewhere.
(I don't doubt that some comments might be reasonably interpreted this way, but presentation matters. So long as no one explicitly says "all Gazans should be assumed terrorists and shot on sight," less direct claims like "I just don't see how Israel has clear options when it comes to clearly distinguishing between guilty Hamas and innocent Gazans, here" should be interpreted more charitably.)
(I also tend to object to people making sweeping characterizations of "this board" while themselves disclaiming such characterizations; you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. The way you've done it here is relatively mild, but still, I don't think it is beneficial for you, or anyone, to approach conversations here as me-against-the-Motte's-hivemind.)
I don't necessarily mind thought experiments that encourage people to put themselves in someone else's shoes, either, but still it would probably be best to not illustrate those thoughts in terms of the direct personal application of an unflattering stereotype of a user's professed identity.
For what it's worth, I think this comment from over the weekend, and its relative lack of pushback, is what may be leading people to believe that people are saying things like this.
Dude, you support mass murder and are praising a state that excludes you from it for its nationalism.
You are definitely a hypocrite.
Not in the least, since I intend to go through legal channels as about the most Westernized an Indian can get, contributing to a valuable profession, and generally being prosocial. My idle musings about my potential path to American citizenship, should it ever materialize, was met with almost unanimous approval from pretty much every side of the political compass, be it here or on Reddit.
You are an antiwestern racist who doesn't respect the native peoples human rights to national self determiantion and sovereignity and have said you would vote for the political party the democrats which is the most unhinged in said direction. Also, you are not part of the Western people you are replacing and making a minority in their own country but part of the colonization and discrimination. When you arrive to the USA you will benefit from discrimination in your favor and join the forces of discrimination against the natives. Which you are screwing by displacing and replacing in their own land.
Your migration is not the same as small migration from and towards a country that respects it self, and is sustainble, but part of colonization.
The Israelis care about numbers and not being overwhelmed by foreign ethnic groups and you praise them for it. Why? Because you are hypocritical.
Ah yes, you (might) have genuine appreciation for the Palestinian cause, I suck up to the Jews.
I show no bias in favor of the Palestinians by opposing mass murder and foreign occupation. I attacked the Palestinians for having a muslim fanatical imperialist mentality, actually. I dislike both Hamas, have a negative view about the fanaticism of Muslims in general, and dislike Israel, have a negative view of Jewish fanaticism in general. I am very much willing to condemn different factions. I complained about historical nazis, I complained about the groups I mentioned, I oppose those with a pushover mentality and I oppose those who are fanatical violent racist supremacists for foreign groups too. Or even for their own.
Its like there is a choice outside of this scumbag behavior that one can choose.
Just cause you support genocide and mass violence in favor of the Jews, don't mistake your own indecency for those of others.
You really are a non Jew who favors Jewish supremacy and mass murder in Israel. Own for it. Now as for why you are sucking up to Jewish extremism, is part of your antiwestern agenda, since the western establishment pushes the same racism against natives and unhinged racism in favor of the Jews as you do. You are willing to support mass murder and Jewish ultranationalism for social status within circles that Jewish supremacy has some valiance like the rationalists.
In any case your racist double standards and hypocricy betrays your lack of philosophical sophistication.
What I am saying is that I prefer the outcome of Israeli dominion and pacification of the contested territories, and I don't particularly care about how they go about it. I do not think violence is anti-sacred and verboten, it's just as fungible as most things are as far as I'm concerned. Tribalism? If you deny that Jews, even those in Israel, have contributed much more to the globe than all their neighbors put together, then sure, you can abuse the term.
Is that you being the westernized Indian? Supporting mass murder as something to not care about and push aside? Maybe like the Jewish migrants in Palestine, you will support this logic against the natives of the western country you will live in. Seems you are quite willing to support colonialism, if it serves your interest.
Masss murder and ultranationalists who abuse the human rights of others winning is worth it because reasons, is not a valid argument.
If you deny that Jews, even those in Israel, have contributed much more to the globe than all their neighbors put together, then sure, you can abuse the term.
The Germans hold records of patents per capita in europe and the Japanese were also much more succdessful than other Asians. And the British contributed much more to humanity than India in modernity. Is mass murder in favor of ethnic domination of these countries good then? Should the British have pacified India harder? What kind of abuse of logic is this?
Israel will still be standing without committing atrocities against the Palestinians. You have never come close to making the work to justify your claims in favor of mass murder.
I am glad you exposed how you and others here are Jewish supremacists. Oh the crocodile tears spent about certain forms of extremism when a different one is the most common one instead.
And your way of thinking would justify a smarter group going around the globe murdering the natives and replacing them everywhere, while promoting hardcore fertility for themselves.
All the liberal ideology you aligned with is hollow. You know what you support aligns more with, right?
It is insane to support mass murder of Palestinians because you consider Jews superior.
While, I think HBD is true, and the anti HBD ers want to silence it so they can get away with being racists under the "overepresentation is due to oppression" narrative, it does seem that when it comes to the Jews in particular we do have HBD leading to the most vile extremism of you and others supporting mass murder which is a very real danger that has materialized.
Although, I think a narrative with HBD is partly to blame and the general ideology of Jewish superiority and they can do no wrong is also directly related. The narrative that connects human biological difference with the right to destroy other groups because yours is superior does deserve to be a taboo. I still am against antiHBDism ideology and the narrative it connects with, but a certain ideology related with HBD should also be kept down.
Dude, you support mass murder and are praising a state that excludes you from it for its nationalism.
Remind me why should I care? I have no plans on going to Israel, except on vacation. After they've dealt with people bombing the concerts, and not just with poor reviews.
The fact that it nominally discriminates against me, yet I still support it, ought to show that I have principles beyond whether or not one side or another is rooting for me.
Now, do tell me how the Palestinians would react to an atheist Indian from a culturally Hindu background shacking up with them? Assuming I was daft enough to. Let's hope the circumcision pulls its weight again.
You are an antiwestern racist
A pro-western racist, or at least a believer in HBD making most claims of rampant racism obsolete in the West, come on dawg. Don't tell me that that is disqualifying for citizenship, or else a large chunk of the West would have to relocate.
In any case your racist double standards and hypocricy betrays your lack of philosophical sophistication.
What does your inability to see that people can and do care about very different things than you do say about you?
Is that you being the westernized Indian? Supporting mass murder as something to not care about and push aside?
I am large. I contain multitudes.
Masss murder and ultranationalists who abuse the human rights of others winning is worth it because reasons, is not a valid arguement.
Agree to disagree?
The Germans hold records of patents per capita in europe and the Japanese were also much more succdessful than other Asians. And the British contributed much more to humanity than India in modernity. Is mass murder in favor of ethnic domination of these countries good then? Should the British have pacified India harder? What kind of abuse of logic is this?
I suppose it's yet another forgivable sin to not read every single comment posted on the Motte, but rest assured that I am on record stating that I believe that a counterfactual world where the British remained in charge of India for decades longer than 1947 would likely have lead to a better outcome, at least for the Indians.
If the Brits and Germans were fighting somebody as profoundly unsympathetic as I find the Palestinians, then sure? Say what you will about India, but we give back more than we take, especially in the talented diaspora I hope to represent.
Israel will still be standing without commiting attrocities against the Palestinians.
Vice-versa.
And your way of thinking would justify a smarter group going around the globe murdering the natives and replacing them everywhere, while promoting hardcore fertility for themselves.
All the liberal ideology you aligned with is hollow. You know what you support aligns more with, right?
If they're accused of murdering the natives, they're not putting their all into it. Then again, the Jews came first, so they're the oppressed native people fighting for the side of freedom and liberty /s
Once again, I never claimed to be a liberal. At most, I'm a classical liberal, with libertarian sympathies, and I could add a dozen more qualifiers to that list. Your attempt to fit me into a convenient bucket leaves my limbs, my dick, and most of my brains sticking out.
While I think you have a point about the forgotten utility of full scale war, I wouldn't characterize the suppression of Tamils in Sri Lanka as a genocide. Nor does the Israeli's potential suppression of the Palestinians require the moniker. That's simply edginess on your part.
I won't split hairs over terminology. Regardless of the moniker, we live in an age where any useful action has been deemed verboten by our modern understanding of martial morality. This grants an advantage to any group that lacks similar moral compunctions.
I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer. But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem.
What seems to be needed is some kind of uh, ultimate, uh, resolution, of the uh, Jewish problem[ of non-Jews existing in their vicinity]. Perhaps one of the greatest question that has ever posed itself to uh, Jews.
So to speak. Some form of uh, physical removal?
understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer. But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem. We used to know these things - all the population transfers and ethnic cleaning that took place after World War I and World War II were done with the understanding that you cannot expect certain groups to coexist in the same space peacefully for long, and that an atrocity in the present may prevent a greater atrocity in the future. We pretend to know better now, and to what end? To keep money flowing to NGOs, and hand out peace prizes to each other?
The Jews are one of the groups closest to your mentality actually based on both rhetoric and action. There is a constrain related to muslim world having its own similar solidarity and fanaticism. And where do you expect Palestinians to go as they are further ethnically cleansed and mass murdered as per your final solution? How is this better for the people involved who are mass murdered? And how would after the crimes you advocate be done, avoid things like what happened in Lebanon after mass migration of Palestinians there?
Genocide as the end of ethnic conflict is myopic way of seeing it. In actuality, genocidal empires are prone to find another group and do to them likewise. Moreover, historically one group out to genocide X leads to Z acting similiarly and you get mass murder. Such escalatory spilar reached that point to begin with because that was the favorable course. That is, if groups follow a greedy path to the extreme, you are going to get ethnic conflict. Although yeah ethnic conflict is rather plausible in non homogeneous societies with human tribalism being what it is. That is why progressive supremacists support diversity because they want to create a coalition to lord over and oppress the native people.
Of course, I would not suggest that people should be pushovers. But the Jews are not the group that are pushovers, to the contrary they benefit from others being pushovers towards their own aggression. And of course from unhinged rhetoric of non Jews in favor of Jewish extremism. Tolerance of Jewish fanaticism is the reason that Israel has escalated the situation already this far. As for the Palestinians, the Islamic fanatics of Hamas also provide no happy solutions.
The best historical solution to the conflict was to keep these two people separate in two seperate states controlled by more moderate nationalists over the current leadership.
In the current case, Israel avoiding massive warcrimes like people here advocate is the sane immediate next step. Already their rhetoric about animals, destroying gaza strip, removing water. Rather than seeking reprisals towards military targets, there is the logic of racist annihilation of the ethnic enemy.
It does show that all the rhetoric of so, so, so many here about bad nationalism, tolerance, human rights, genocide denial of 80 year old genocides being of such a moral afront, being nice, whines about racism etc, etc are just the hollow words of hypocrites who align with the most unhinged nationalism and racism of a Jewish hue and even from a political coalition of the far right that is particularly and genuine extreme in said direction.
And of course that you can get away with this rhetoric in favor of mass murder and genocide against the Palestinians without a ban is precisely because of what group you have chosen to target. It's why it would be a good thing if the kind of people who run institutions, including internet forums started to get punished for the kind of unhinged bipartisan (i.e. progressive supremacist or Israeli jewish supremacist) extremism they have been tolerating and encouraging.
People here unironically care and are more passionate in arguing about people denying past genocide involving the jews, than people promoting current genocides in favor of the Jews.
I don't know about others, but I argue against Holocaust deniers not because I have any sort of pro-Jewish agenda but simply because I think that Holocaust denial theories are very implausible and most people who adhere to them do so for emotional reasons rather than intellectual ones. So when I see them, I have the same kind of mental reaction that I would if someone came here and started arguing that the Apollo moon landing never happened, or if someone started arguing that Christianity is literally true.
And of course that you can get away with this rhetoric in favor of mass murder and genocide against the Palestinians without a ban is precisely because of what group you have chosen to target.
You can probably get away with arguing for mass murder and genocide of pretty much any group here as long as you write it in a sufficiently dispassionate-sounding, academic style.
I do find unhinged pro-genocide rants distasteful, but so far at least, somewhat to my surprise, I haven't actually seen anything too barbaric here. Maybe I just need to keep reading this thread further, lol. It would not surprise me to see some.
Or maybe spending a lot of time on 4chan has made Motteizens' occasional murderous rants seem relatively tame to me in comparison.
I’m not convinced that it’s the genocide part that’s important. The solution is to break the will of people to continue to resist. It can be done without killing everyone, but it has to be done with exactly that goal in mind — by the time the smoke clears the very idea of attempting to start a battle with the other side should be unthinkable.
This is exactly correct, and I think it is the true aim of some of the Israeli leadership at this point. That breaking point may be very far along the line however, given the experiences of the 20th century, and I'm not convinced the Israelis have the will to go as far as they will need to.
The analogy above someone used of the war with Japan is a good one: in that case the US acted continually as if their goal was the complete subjugation of the Japanese people at any cost, if not through unconditional surrender then by annihilation. That approach works, but you have to follow it - you can't bluff at it.
So you are interested in enough mass murder so Palestinians will accept anything Jews do and will never even think of attempting to start a battle with the other side.
I am pretty sure you are pointing trivialities and it is the genocide you support as a solution that is important and not the fact that it leads to the defeat of your enemy like you pretend.
A pro-Palestine rally in Sydney has featured the same kind of naked antisemitism that is increasingly common at these sorts of events - in this case including chants of "fuck the Jews".
However, unlike America which has a first amendment to protect offensive speech, Australia is not so squeamish about cracking down on wrongthink. Conservatives tried (and failed) some years back to change the federal law that makes it illegal to "offend or insult" a person on the basis of race, and state-based racial vilification laws carry criminal penalties. States recently have been banning the swastika and other Nazi symbols too.
So, how does this get applied when the racial vilification is coming from Labor-voting Muslims rather than One Nation-voting whites? Well, we got an indication today:
NSW premier Chris Minns said the police’s decision to allow the protest was “operational”.
NSW police have launched an investigation and the premier warned anyone caught taking part in “racial vilification or incitement of hatred or incitement of violence” would be charged. He described the scenes at the Opera House as “abhorrent”.
“To have some people celebrate atrocious indiscriminate killing and kidnapping in Israel is appalling,” he said.
“This is the opposite of the dynamic multicultural community we want in NSW and Australia. Racial epithets were thrown at the Jewish community by the mere fact that they were members of the Jewish community which is shocking and abusive and potentially a crime.”
To be clear, I supported the unsuccessful move to amend the Racial Discrimination Act and generally think that expressing odious views should not be illegal. But I'm also a big believer in the even handed application of law, and given that the country decided to reject the argument that "people have a right to be bigots" (as Brandis put it), I'm going to give myself a pass to enjoy watching some of the less pleasant parts of society get an involuntary legal education.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
AshLael 6mo ago
The question I keep coming back to when I see these pro-Palestinians-murdering-Jews rallies is, "why are these people here?". That's my instinctual response to seeing this in New York, Toronto, Sidney, really any nice, polite, Anglo-founded civilization. Don't get me wrong, I understand why they want to be here, there's all sorts of material goods to be gained by moving to nice, polite, Anglo-founded civilizations. What I mean is how did we wind up with a set of policies that allowed immigration of people that were going to bring their old ethnic hatreds and import them to nice, polite, Anglo civilizations. I can't really begrudge black Americans for holding a grudge over American history and I certainly will grant that Native Americans have a point or two. But why the hell did we add a set of people with Middle Eastern grievances to celebrate the barbaric murder of Jews?
This is, of course, rhetorical and I am familiar with the history of immigration in these countries, but I just can't get past that being my sentiment every time. Whether people have a right to be bigots or not, Sydney didn't need to invite them in to do on the steps of the Opera House. The people that want to engage in desert barbarism should be doing so in said desert, not in Times Square.
Many Irish-Americans supported the IRA, and indeed one can imagine, Native Americans complaining about why these Anglos came here and brought all their nonsense from the Old World, with their Protestants and Catholics and Monarchists and so on.
You're starting from a premise that Anglos didn't bring their grievances with them, and I don't think that is clearly true. In fact the truth is, I think everywhere we go, (people in general) we always bring our grievances with us. From Puritan settlers to Quakers and on, you can see those grievances impact on today. Why do you think PA has such restrictive liquor laws compated to say Texas?
We can just over a long enough period, replace our old grievances with new ones that better fit our new situation. It just takes time.
Give it a minute and just like Irish-Americans complaining more about blacks in Boston, or Polacks somewhere else, everyone will get proper new grievances against the people next door instead. Yes, yes Israel is bad, but have you seen that they want to put a half way house just down from the mosque?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
SSCReader 6mo ago
Many Irish-Americans supported the IRA
Yeah, and it wasn't great!
Native Americans complaining about why these Anglos came here and brought all their nonsense from the Old World, with their Protestants and Catholics and Monarchists and so on.
As above, I think the Natives have something of a point. If nothing else, I surely wouldn't be inclined to tell them that it's actually pretty normal and that they're a bunch of bigots for not welcoming it. The parallels obviously stop making sense in short order, but I think we can confidently say that the squabbles of Europeans being brought to Americans shores sucked for the people that were the previous residents of those shores.
My views largely align with yours. I wish Australia had true freedom of speech backed in our Constitution. Alas, looks like I'll have to settle for your rules applied fairly your rules selectively applied to benefit you.
This is a great example of selective enforcement and Who Whom. White nationalists would never be allowed to undertake the same protest. Particularly without filing a 'Form 1' with NSW Police (or Notice of Intention to Hold a Public Assembly) as was the case with the Pro-Palestinian rally.
Beyond this, this type of ethnic tension is endemic in multi-cultural societies. As I said recently regarding the Sikh assassination in Canada, political agitators who cannot leave their old countries' grudges at the door when emigrating to the West should fail the character test and be denied citizenship.
As I said recently regarding the Sikh assassination in Canada, political agitators who cannot leave their old countries' grudges at the door when emigrating to the West should fail the character test and be denied citizenship.
This is going to fail the disparate impact test - and it'll probably count as antisemitic too given how many jews are Israeli partisans. I happen to agree with you that it is a good idea, but you're not going to be able to get the left to agree to a policy that effectively translates to mostly allowing white and asian immigrants.
Which is interesting considering how people openly talk about genociding Palestinians. They aren't really shown as humans and politicians openly talk about how they various war crimes should be commited against them. Funny how talking about turning Gaza into glass isn't hate speach but we aren't allowed to criticise the people of Israel. I hardly think the police would crack down on fuck the Russians at a pro Ukraine rally.
Right wingers get kicked off twitter for proposing mild measures to reduce immigration. Israelis can cheer on mass bombing of Palestinians, blocking food and electricity to civilians and demolishing their homes and churches without consequence.
Could you show me some examples of politicians saying what you believe to the the equivalent here?
I’ve certainly seen things about bombing Gaza, but this comes immediately after a terrorist attack, and there is an implied “let/force the civilians to leave”.
Here's a politician in the Israeli legislature from Netanyahu's party Likud calling for Israel to use their nuclear weapons rather than ground forces. "Doomsday weapons" is the thinly veiled euphemism Israelis often use to refer to their officially unacknowledged but open secret nuclear arsenal.
Jericho Missile! Jericho Missile! Strategic alert. before considering the introduction of forces.
Doomsday weapon! This is my opinion.
May God preserve all our strength
After seeing those Khaazar Milkers, I'm sympathetic. Unless you also intend to tell me that the "gas the Jews" chanting alongside it wasn't intended to be an invitation to huff nitrous, an authentic Australian pastime if I've heard one.
Honestly, one of the primary benefits of the US seceding from British influence by force was a ground-up reconstruction of its legal system and implicit constitution. While the average Westerner who doesn't think too hard might look at comparable standards of living in the Commonwealth and the US, they have very different presumptions underlying their judicial system and tolerance for political incorrectness.
I live in a very progressive part of the US. I had a moment earlier today when I was surrounded by some Jewish community members/friends, and they were talking about how difficult it's been at work for them this week, because they have to put up with many of their coworkers saying "horrible things" (read: things that they don't agree with regarding the recent events). These community members are the same people who went spouting all manners of progressive talking points in so many inappropriate and unnecessary contexts over the past 5 or so years, from BLM, to covid, to Trump derangement syndrome, and so many more issues.
I'm sure I wouldn't like what these people's coworkers are saying, but I find myself feeling more than ever wanting to say to these people, "So what? You can't have everyone agree with you". I guess I'm now an expert at being around people who say things that make my blood boil. I put up with progressives at work, in my social circles, in my local community events, in stores, who constantly barrage me with their unsolicited progressive message. I not only never say anything anymore, but I act as if I'm completely unbothered. As a result, I find myself having very little sympathy, but a lot of empathy for these pro Israel progressives. I'm sure the irony is completely lost on them, but it makes me wonder how certain people can go through life with so little perspective that they feel so put upon by people with different viewpoints, yet cannot fathom that they may make others feel that way with their own, and that maybe they're wrong to do so.
Because, from their perspective, they’re obviously right, and everyone else is obviously either evil or straight up insane. Yes, enough exposure to contrary evidence might change their minds. But they don’t have it.
There’s a lot of wiggle room in “things that they don’t agree with”. The last week has had a lot of public statements that range from disagreements on strategy and ethics for a difficult ground war to questions related to the cycle of violence to ‘that live-streamed mass shooting was faked and if it wasn’t it was a political conspiracy‘ to literally complaining The Final Solution didn’t go far enough. The imprecision of the rest of your post does not really make clear what you’re engaged with.
There’s perhaps a steelman where even the most extreme sides of that spectrum did not have a even or honest application against the Red Tribe (both that Damore was not tolerated, and that the Blue Tribe equivalents to Alex Jones were), and I’d probably agree with you for a significant part of it. But outside of the irony of it all, I don’t really see how much info there is in people only noticing when their ox is on the line.
You're singing my song. I've had to deal with this over, and over, and over, and over. It's tiresome. The most common incarnation is when they're not sure they can enjoy the work of this celebrity or that celebrity anymore because they did something that was insensitive to this group or that group.
You ask "how certain people can go through life with so little perspective that they feel so put upon by people with different viewpoints, yet cannot fathom that they may make others feel that way with their own, and that maybe they're wrong to do so." (I'm tired and so I'm using direct quotes.) The answer is that.. "it's just different". People who reason emotionally will use their emotions as a justification, and if you can get them to verbalize it, they'll say "it's just different."
All people see themselves as the center of their universe, but only a minority recognize that they do. If you see yourself as the center of the universe and have no cause to correct for that assumption, decisions of "right" and "wrong" will be based entirely on emotion, all the time. No meta level reasoning necessary, because it's not like your feelings can be wrong.
I'm not rational. But I admire rationalists. And that so many people flagrantly disregard the need to be less biased irritates me to no end.
If you see yourself as the center of the universe and have no cause to correct for that assumption, decisions of "right" and "wrong" will be based entirely on emotion, all the time. No meta level reasoning necessary, because it's not like your feelings can be wrong.
Not only that, but that person is also bombarded nearly non-stop with progressive messaging. Media, Universities, Federal Government, and social circles are all telling this person that they are 100% correct.
What are their coworkers saying that your Jewish friends think is ‘horrible’? I can’t imagine people are saying genuine pro-Hamas stuff in a progressive regular workplace in the US, this isn’t a decolonial reading circle at Columbia.
Thankful as ever it would be considered weird to discuss politics seriously in my workplace.
I can’t imagine people are saying genuine pro-Hamas stuff in a progressive regular workplace in the US, this isn’t a decolonial reading circle at Columbia.
You might need to expand your imagination, though it's mostly as @haroldbkny says, stuff about Israel being to blame because of their oppression of the Palestinians. Me, I stay out of that, if there's going to be sectarian violence between the Muslims and the Jews at the workplace, I don't want to be around.
(Ha ha no, it's not really the Muslims who are posting stuff like that; our Muslims are not Palestinian and mostly not even Arab. It's white people)
I think in the context of the conversation I was having, it was mostly regarding people saying that Israel was to blame for any and all violence Hamas may do. It's also worth noting that some of the people involved work at universities, where such sentiment is more common.
How many of those Jews offended by this terrible statement were fully onboard with the George Floyd riots? The party line was that those riots were the language of the unheard, a reaction to oppression, and a civil rights movement. How many George Floyd's have Israeli police or soldiers made in Gaza?
A person who supported BLM riots, who is progressive politically, but has found a sudden sympathy for using military action to reduce wanton violence by a marginalized minority?
With the reports of Egypt notifying Israel in advance of an impending attack, people here and elsewhere have wondered if Bibi maybe let the attack slip through on purpose to consolidate power. Overnight he went from dealing with protests against his judicial reforms and the draft to having those problems disappear and securing the full backing of a broad unity government with his former opposition.
An overwhelming majority of 86% of respondents, including 79% of coalition supporters, said the surprise attack from Gaza is a failure of the country's leadership...
Furthermore, almost all of the respondents (94%) believe the government has responsibility for the lack of security preparedness that led to the assault on the South, with over 75% saying the government holds most of the responsibility...
A slim majority of 56% said Netanyahu must resign at the end of the war, with 28% of coalition voters agreeing with this view.
In addition, 52% of respondents also expect Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to resign.
In addition, most respondents also noted that they do not trust the government to lead the war on Gaza, though the poll was held prior to former defense minister Benny Gantz joining an emergency unity government on Wednesday evening.
Is there any way for Bibi to hold onto power? If not, what might the future look like?
If he knew it was coming the way to consolidate power would have been a thousand Palestinians dead in the attack, a handful of civilians, and a 100 IDF. Looking extremely competent as you crush a massive attack as it happens boost support. Instead he looks incompetent. I guess you would make Hamas think your weak but have everything in place to crush the attack.
The only 4-D chess move for letting the attack happen would be getting the world to accept that Palestine and Israel can not exists together and getting global community to look the other way as you create 2 million refugees and someone like Egypt reluctantly accepting them.
Egypt wont accept them, though. Sane regimes don’t let millions of terrorists in, and Hamas is literally a splinter group from Al-Sisi’s main opposition.
To say nothing of the usual prejudices against Palestinians.
If he knew it was coming the way to consolidate power would have been a thousand Palestinians dead in the attack, a handful of civilians, and a 100 IDF. Looking extremely competent as you crush a massive attack as it happens boost support.
I think Netanyahu's going to retire or be shoved out of the public sphere regardless of what extent he 'knew' an attack was coming. The pre-October doctrine where Gaza was left to Hamas with business relations, a jobs program, and occasional missile exchanges and shooting atrocities was Netanyahu's brainchild, a major bet that no matter Hamas' public doctrine it wouldn't do anything as an organization outside of The Usual. It was a sad and bloody sort of 'deescalation', where a 'win' for Hamas was a gentleman's agreement for the Israeli's to not explode every member of Hamas' senior leadership, but they had eight years of that and it was a lot nicer for Hamas leadership than exploding, and the rule brought everyone to this.
((Separately, the emphasis on the failed judicial reform bill in a lot of these theories is kinda goofy. Netanyahu didn't win, but neither did Biden get a SCOTUS expansion. They gambled some political capital and lost; it's not the end of the world.))
((Separately, the emphasis on the failed judicial reform bill in a lot of these theories is kinda goofy. Netanyahu didn't win, but neither did Biden get a SCOTUS expansion. They gambled some political capital and lost; it's not the end of the world.))
I'm not sure what you mean by either of these, Netanyahu was successful in his judicial reform bill, pending SC review; Biden was against the SCOTUS expansion and never tried.
I think it's more the optics of six months of large scale protests disapearing overnight, but I agree that wouldn't have driven Bibi to do something so crazy. I think it might've been unclear, but part of why I made that post was to illustrate how unlikely it was that he let the attack go through given that polls show what many people would have suspected, that it was bad for his own own political future.
In a monumental, highly controversial decision, the High Court of Justice strikes down legislation passed earlier this year that curtailed judicial oversight of the government, annulling for the first time in Israel’s history an element of one of its quasi-constitutional Basic Laws.
The court split almost down the middle over the highly contentious legislation, which eliminated judicial use of the “reasonableness” standard — the only significant law from the government’s judicial overhaul agenda to have been passed so far. Eight justices vote in favor of striking down the law, while seven vote to uphold it.
For historical reference Golda Meir (Mapai->Labor) was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin (Alignment->Labor) but her and her party did retain power though there were less domestic political issues plaguing Labor as a whole then and they did drop in parliament seats compared to before the war.
The idea that Netanyahu doesn't prioritize his career above all things is as implausible
Is Bibi really in control, does he really have any power?
Everyone here knows gentile conspiracy theories claiming that everything and everyone are controlled by Freemasons, Illuminati and lizard people, who are in turn controlled by (((you know who))).
Let me now enlighten this thread a little bit and present here authentically Jewish Pizzagate tier conspiracy theory well known in Israel.
A video making waves on social media in recent days claims that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara have a legal contract between them that gives her sweeping control over core aspects of Israel’s national affairs. This includes provisions for her to sit-in at top-secret meetings and to sign off on appointments of the heads of the Mossad intelligence agency, Shin Bet domestic security service, and the Israeli military.
According to Arzi, the contract also includes the prime minister promising that any trip with an overnight stay will include his wife.
“She can take part in all the most secret meetings, even though she does not have security clearance. That jumped out at me,” Arzi says in the video, part of an interview in Hebrew with journalist Dan Raviv.
“She authorizes the following appointments, the head of the Mossad, the head of the Shin Bet and the IDF chief of staff. And that is in writing, she has to give the authorization in writing, if not, it is a violation of the contract,” he said, adding that “violation would mean he forfeits all their property to her.”
The alleged contract further makes various stipulations that give Sara major control over the couple’s finances.
claims that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara have a legal contract between them that gives her sweeping control over core aspects of Israel’s national affairs
This is the most jewish concept I've read about in a year. A "contract" between her and her husband for control of isreal?????
The reports that Netanyahu[1] knew about the attack and let it happen has even less credibility than the story about 40 beheaded/burned babies yanked from incubators, the ghost of Kiev, Trump pisstapes being sent via DNS packet backchannels to a bank's email server, Sadaam yellowcake, or Bush personally planning 9/11.
It's just speculation on speculation on speculation and imo not even worthy of mentioning without a heavy dose of "yeah this sounds crazy but whatif".
[1]: It's a very interesting meme that people have started referring to him as "Bibi". This seems new to me.
It's a very interesting meme that people have started referring to him as "Bibi". This seems new to me.
I think it's a clout chasing thing. It seemed to start a few years ago as a way for people to imply they know Netanyahu personally (or at least know people who do). Same as referring to Jeff Bezos as "Jeff" or William Shatner as "Bill".
stolen_brawnze
I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song.
jeroboam 6mo ago·Edited 6mo ago
That...can't be it. I think at the least conscious level it's a way to signal that you're someone who keeps up and is well-informed. Just like on February 26, 2022 you could sort normal people from the people who were mainlining /r/worldnews by whether or not they had switched to "Kyiv" yet.
Sudden linguistic shifts like this do annoy me (why do Associated Press style guides get the final say on the English language??) and they do give me big "overnight software update" vibes. Another consequence of the fact that no one reads anything older than one year anymore, so that language is going to start changing faster.
The idea that Netanyahu doesn't prioritize his career above all things is as implausible as the idea that Hamas would establish a just state that accords rights and freedoms to Jews given the chance.
Yes, it is from 1992, but things changed little since then. Israel has strict gun laws and they work as intended. Israel has 6,7 guns per 100 inhabitants, very good 108th place in the world. Just 2.1 more than David Hogg heaven land England and Wales, considered to be gun control movement dream and aspiration.
People who do not like guns usually do not like Israel either and would loathe to praise anything coming from there. The same reason why we never heard about Israeli health care or Israeli abortion laws despite that they would make excellent talking point for Blues against Israel loving Reds.
And people who like guns usually like Israel too (while knowing about it only from dank memes that show it as tough nation armed to the teeth).
So, you want to ask, you are blaming the victims? How dare you?
The Israelis were told by their government: "Millions of people who want to kill you live near your homes separated by wire fence. Do not panic and do not prepare to defend yourselves. Your government and your army will protect you, nothing can happen. Fear that they will cross the fence and slaughter you in your own homes is absurd and delusional. Do not be conspiracy theorist, do not be extremist, trust the plan". And, being normal human beings, they trusted because the government was right so far, because nothing happened so far. This is normal human nature, no one to blame.
Now, when something happened, and if nothing changes and Israelis will continue trusting their government as previously, yes I will blame them, and you shall too.
Any citizen who meets the detailed tests for carrying a private firearm due to self-defense and serving the security forces and is without a criminal or medical record will be required to undergo a telephone interview instead of a physical interview
What are the tests?
Residence in an eligible settlement, rifle veterans 07 and above, officers in the rank of lieutenant and above and combatants in the rank of major and above in the IDF and the security forces, service in special units, firefighters, policemen, and workers and volunteers in the rescue forces
So very generous. And, in addition, citizens will be able to purchase, instead of previous fifty, whole ONE HUNDRED rounds of ammo! Yay!
The festival was one small part of the attack. Technicals stuffed with gunmen were shooting at civilians in urban centers, with many of the videographers within range and great firing positions to respond.
My impression while watching them was almost 100% "Damn, a rifle instead of a phone would be really nice for these guys".
Bizarre that you think gun control is the most inflammatory issue. Is it a joke? Far and away the most inflammatory issue would be Israel's right to exist and segregate the Arabs and whether that justifies atrocities against Israeli civilians. Literally every discussion online about this, if it goes on long enough, will go back to 1948 or earlier. This is a classic culture war issue.
I think that for Israeli Jews, trying to make it easier for citizens to own guns would put them between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand, they would be loath to let ethnically Arab citizens of Israel have guns because that would make it much easier for those of them who want to kill Jews to actually do it.
On the other hand, there is no way to write a gun control law that takes ethnicity into account without making it completely obvious that you are running an ethno-state and thus looking really bad to a lot of people in the broader world.
On the other hand, there is no way to write a gun control law that takes ethnicity into account without making it completely obvious that you are running an ethno-state and thus looking really bad to a lot of people in the broader world.
But they are already running an ethno-state. No outsider considers it not to be an ethnic state unless they are making PR mouth noises pretending to the contrary.
,Yes, but bringing it to the arena of gun laws would take it up a notch and look particularly ugly because it basically would look like "we are going to make it legal for any of our random vigilantes and paramilitary groups to easily buy guns while at the same time we will ensure that it is illegal for the Palestinians to defend themselves from such violence".
On the other hand, there is no way to write a gun control law that takes ethnicity into account without making it completely obvious that you are running an ethno-state and thus looking really bad to a lot of people in the broader world.
Easier than you might think, and Israel is already doing it. To get a gun license in Israel you need to have completed a certain degree of military training (among other requirements). Non-Jews (Druze, Bedouins, some Christian Arabs) who serve in the IDF are not those that you need to worry about starting a riot at the behest of Hamas or Hezbollah.
Omitted from The Reload is that they are limited to a single firearm that is not a semiauto rifle. So most typically a semiauto pistol like a Glock. And absent the "Short Barreled Rifle" and "Short Barreled Shotgun" NFA restrictions (that existed to close a loophole during drafting when pistols were going to be similarly restricted but when pistols were removed from the bill, the loophole closure was not), has led to the amusing product design space of pistol chassis systems. Americans answer for short carbines working around their laws was the pistol brace, for Israelis the microroni.
The microroni is just a rifle attachment for a handgun. I suppose you're more accurate with it, but the ballistics of it are still shitty compared to a real rifle.
The Israelis were told by their government: "Millions of people who want to kill you live near your homes separated by wire fence. Do not panic and do not prepare to defend yourselves. Your government and your army will protect you, nothing can happen. Fear that they will cross the fence and slaughter you in your own homes is absurd and delusional.
About a billion plus Indians and a sizeable hundred millions of Pakistanis accept the same deal from their governments without complaint. So do South Koreans, and even their stunted northern cousins. In the former case, there are entire border states where there's a very real risk of Jihadists slipping under the fence and shooting up your village. No demands for guns, just better security from the BSF and Indian Army.
I would be rather concerned if the government was demanding I arm myself to do the job I pay them taxes for, even if I'm a gun nut, and if I ever make it to the US and the decent guns aren't banned, I intend to buy several.
You're observing the very much discussed to death notion that people get along and cheer more for a far-group than they do their far more similar peers who hold much more similar cultural and political views. The Leftists celebrating Palestine don't all want to wear hijabs or ban alcohol, even if a few of them get signal boosted.
About a billion plus Indians and a sizeable hundred millions of Pakistanis accept the same deal from their governments without complaint.
There's been a whole lot of complaining. And it's not "a billion plus Indians", it's only the relatively few near the hot borders.
So do South Koreans
No, there's more than a fence between the South and the North; there's a 4km wide demilitarized zone with minefields and military bases just south of it (and, I presume, north of it)
About a billion plus Indians and a sizeable hundred millions of Pakistanis accept the same deal from their governments without complaint
Does indians and pakistani hate each other or only their governments? AK 47 doesn't do much good against an army. Against people in toyota trucks they are good enough. A couple of well places snipers could have reduced the festival casualties and probably prevented some of the rapes.
Does indians and pakistani hate each other or only their governments?
Depends. As you'd expect but for a question covering >1.5 billion people.
I didn't notice any animosity from the Pakistani doctors I befriended in London, barring a few jokes about some poor pilot who got shot down in Pakistani airspace and was mildly roughed up before being exchanged. I suppose the fact that I didn't give a shit made them warm up even faster, I'm no nationalist, at least except when I pine for the US.
You will find hundreds of millions of hardliners, and hundreds of millions more who are indifferent or outright alarmed at the idea of war. If war happens, it's most likely going to be because the US and China kickoff and allies and associates get drawn in. Or an inciting event beyond my power to predict.
I think there's more bellicosity on the Pakistani side, their military relies on fear mongering about India to justify their occasional coups. And the ISI, they need something bigger than Afghanistan to show they're worth more than the damage they deal, which isn't really true itself.
AK 47 doesn't do much good against an army.
I would hope not even the Palestinians are using something as antiquated as a genuine AK-47, or at least the modernized (so early it's hardly modern) AKM. But I get your point.
If they had looser gun control laws, I’d expect just as often those looser guns end up in the hands of terrorists as in the hands of people using them for self-defense.
The gun control policy works well for Israel. They have low crime. They have low suicides.
They do have a very significant problem with Palestinian terrorists, but it's obvious that simply ending gun control would not be a sufficient response to that problem - large scale military action is required. So there is no problem that could actually get solved by a change in gun policy, and several significant problems that could easily be created by it.
Their military was apparently caught with their pants down, why would you expect civilians to do better instead of just becoming tasty weapon lootboxes?
Because if you own a gun you're already in your house...with the gun. So when you hear your neighbors getting executed, you take out your gun and stop the person doing the executing.
This is Lex Fridman interviewing Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner is interesting on his own, and as an advisor to President Trump, but what makes him really interesting given the topic at hand today is the role that he had in negotiating The Abraham Accords: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Accords?useskin=vector
The Abraham Accords are bilateral agreements on Arab–Israeli normalization signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on September 15, 2020.[1][2] Mediated by the United States, the initial announcement of August 13, 2020, concerned only Israel and the United Arab Emirates before the announcement of a follow-up agreement between Israel and Bahrain on September 11, 2020. On September 15, 2020, the official signing ceremony for the first iteration of the Abraham Accords was hosted by the Trump administration at the White House.[3] As part of the dual agreements, both the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain recognized Israel's sovereignty, enabling the establishment of full diplomatic relations.
The Trump administration had normalization between Israel and Palestine as one of its primary policy goals, and they actually (via the Abraham Accords) made real progress towards it. It's a tragedy that they weren't able to keep working on this. I strongly suspect that this, (as well as [not to get too far off topic here], Biden's multiple absolute foreign policy embarrassments) will be a major issue in the coming 2024 elections. I think that the reality is that the world really was a much safer, much more peaceful, much more prosperous place under the Trump administration (although not domestically, given the Floyd riots). The guy being interviewed here, like him or not, seems to have had a role in making that happen.
And as a complete aside: my absolute dream podcast guest on Lex Fridman would be Steve Bannon. I strongly suspect that Trump is largely a creation of Bannon, and hearing a long form interview with him would be absolutely fascinating. If you need an introduction to Bannon, here's a talk, as well as substantial Q&A that he did at the Oxford Student Union 4 years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8AtOw-xyMo8
Anyway, this is all related. Kushner definitely has some interesting things to say about the current crisis.
This is the /r/lexfridman discussion about this podcast. Nearly every one of these top comments are some version of "what the hell does Jared Kushner have to say about anything?" - Lex Fridman's audience I suspect thinks of themselves as above average intelligence and doesn't even have basic knowledge of this topic they're all talking so confidently about. Insane.
The most upvoted questions seem to be something like, "why didn't Lex ask about the 2 billion.", which is funny because he does ask about it. Jared seemed reasonably thoughtful. Over the course of Trump's presidency we saw Jared's reputation change from wonder-kid to village idiot. I don't know if he is a wonder kid, but he certainly isn't the village idiot.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Israeli Invasion Plans Target Gaza City and Hamas Leadership
From the New York Times’ report on the coming invasion (emphasis mine):
Tens of thousands of Hamas gunmen are thought to have entrenched themselves inside hundreds of miles of underground tunnels and bunkers beneath Gaza City and the surrounding parts of northern Gaza. Israeli military leaders expect that Hamas will attempt to impede their progress by blowing up some of those tunnels as Israelis advance above them, and by exploding roadside bombs and booby-trapping buildings.
Hamas also plans to ambush Israeli forces from behind by emerging suddenly from hidden tunnel openings dotted across northern Gaza, according to a Hamas officer who was not authorized to speak to the news media.
To make it easier for its soldiers to operate, the Israeli military’s rules of engagement have been loosened to allow soldiers to make fewer checks before shooting at suspected enemies, the three Israeli officers said, without giving further details.
The invasion was initially planned for the weekend, but was delayed by a few days at least in part because of weather conditions that would have made it harder for Israeli pilots and drone operators to provide ground forces with air cover, the officers said.
In addition to infantry, the Israeli strike force will include tanks, sappers and commandos, the officers added. The ground troops will be given cover by war planes, helicopter gunships, aerial drones and artillery fired from land and sea.
Hard not to see this turning into an unimaginable bloodbath. Tens of thousands of fighters? That tunnel guy’s YouTube video suggested they’d be extremely difficult to root out. I suppose all the hostages are living on borrowed time, if still alive. It promises to be a harsh look at the reality of modern urban warfare against a highly entrenched foe.
I'd still like to think Bibi is smarter than this, and that this is just bluffing. I recall him saying, years ago, that a key part of his strategy against Iran was them thinking "there's a crazy guy in Jerusalem willing to do anything".
Judge people by their actions. So far, Israel's tactic has been to starve, bomb and wear out the civilian population of Gaza. The endgame is clearly a massive ethnic cleansing. There are also rumors the US has offered Egypt monetary benefits to host at least a million Gazans in a "tent city". If I were Bibi, I'd act just like he has thus far. It's the smart, cost-effective strategy. Clearly, the status quo cannot continue and Israel is trying its level best to get rid of the Gaza civilian population. But doing so, even with the backing of the US, is harder than you might think given 24/7 media.
One last thing. One theme I've harped on is Bibi rhetorically boxing himself in. He has now set expectations very high that he may simply be forced to do things he knows are foolish because it would end his political career otherwise. I understand this sounds extraordinarily callous that a man in his position would be willing to sacrifice many lives to save his political skin, but I am no longer discounting any possibility.
Hand to heart, what do you think his odds of remaining in the upper echelons of Israeli politics are? He has failed catastrophically, but if he executes the «flawed but reliable tough-minded leader carrying us through the uncertain times of crisis» move well… I am not sure it'll work. But also, that's much of his expertise and genius.
Doesn't Bibi have that Berlusconi quality where you can get rubbished a dozen times but still bounce reliably back in time? Then again he's 73, but Berlusconi managed to hang on to some power almost to the end, too.
How much ordinance would it take to turn the entire Gaza strip into Verdun? I doubt that Israel has enough in its stockpile (unless we're counting the nukes), but it could theoretically be done.
My guess is that Israel will advance to the sea along a narrow front through the middle of the strip, cutting the insurgents fortified in Gaza City off from supplies and humanitarian aid being brought in from the South. How many weeks worth of provisions do you think Hamas has stocked up underground?
I did the math before out of curiosity to see how many 155mm shells it would take to cover all of the Gaza strip with the lethal radius of at least one shell's explosion. It came out to around 52 million shells. If all 250 of Israel's m109 howitzers fired at their sustained rate of fire of one round per minute (and assuming no need for maintenance etc) it would take them around 144 days. I was looking at this just to get some idea of the scales involved in all this.
Judging by satellite imagery, there's enough farmland south of Gaza that the front doesn't have to be that narrow. There are towns like Al-Mughraqa in the way, but they are similar enough to Donbass suburbs that IDF could hire some Wagner instructors or even point teams.
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of tunnel-gassing or some other tactic used to kill the people in them before going in. International treaties be damned. Screw going down into those things.
Israel probably doesn’t have the capacity to clear tunnels by chemical warfare, and won’t in time to help the invasion.
The reason is simple- quantity. Successful chemical warfare requires tons and tons and tons of the stuff, even in a confined space. Israel almost certainly doesn’t have that much, we’d know if they did because it’s sufficiently capital-intensive that you can’t hide it. And while it has a relatively short time frame to produce(after all, civilian chemical plants produce similar chemicals all the time), we’re still talking about months and months. And Israel wants to go in soon.
but israel/IDF had known for years if not decades about these tunnels. You are saying they have prepared for this sort of thing at all, even as an contingent solution?
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of tunnel-gassing or some other tactic used to kill the people in them before going in. International treaties be damned. Screw going down into those things.
Several times during WWII, the US Army was faced with similar situations involving well-fortified Japanese emplacements. In some of these instances, like Fort Drum in Manila, combat engineers pumped in thousands of gallons of mixed diesel fuel and gasoline, followed by a timed incendiary charge. I think the more modern solution typically involves thermobaric weapons. I'm not aware of any treaty since that would prohibit either, but both seem like painful ways to go out.
Yep, if you light the chemicals on fire, it's perfect legal and it works even better. Not too many airtight doors will withstand a fuel-air explosion in the next compartment.
Yes, I would think something like this is better. If you use any type of poison gas, after you deploy it, you will eventually have to clean it out, make it safe, and check out what's in there. A major pain in the ass and high risk of friendly casualties if you don't do it perfectly. If you use flammables or explosives, then you know it's safe after the stuff goes boom and it has a little time to cool down.
Goes along with the argument I read somewhere else - poison gas isn't used anymore because it isn't a very good weapon, not because its effects are so horrible or it's banned by treaty. It was probably possible to ban by treaty because it's not a very good weapon more than being horrible.
A good rule of thumb is that if US signs some treaty about avoiding given type of weapons, it means it’s ineffective, but if it doesn’t, it is useful and practical. Compare, for example, chemical weapons, which US agreed to not use, with land mines or cluster munitions, which very much are a part of US arsenal, despite existence of treaties banning these: US is just not a signatory to these.
Even more cynically, the treaties that US is not a signatory to, simply are not worth much in the first place: the signatories to these simply don’t expect to fight a serious war that would require using these, so commitment to not use them is not worth much, because they will likely disregard their obligations soon as they do find themselves in one. See, for example, Ukraine, which happily uses these, despite being a signatory to Ottawa treaty.
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Notes -
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
One of the most edifying experiences of my youth was an academic assignment in the GWOT era, when we were instructed to pick a terrorist group and study its formation and evolution. I knew everyone else would pick something Islamic, so I decided to pick something else to stand out, and I settled on Sri Lanka. For about 33 years (1976 to 2009), Sri Lanka saw a brutal civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, where the two sides could be neatly demarcated into separate ethnicities, separate religions, and separate languages - not dissimilar to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Tamils were represented by the LTTE, which was a terrorist organization and a separatist group seeking to carve out an ethnostate from Tamil-dominated regions of the country. But the LTTE was also a remarkably sophisticated pseudo-state; most terrorist organizations don't have their own navy, air force, or intelligence apparatus, which are all things that the LTTE put together during their war against the Sri Lankan state.
I won't rehash the disputes and grievances of the war, since they are predictable and your imagination can reliably fill in the details from what you know of other ethnic conflicts, including the one in Israel. All race wars are eventually the same. Long story short is that tens of thousands of people died on both sides, and numerous foreign actors including the US, Norway, India, the EU, and the UN tried to intervene and broker a peace, and the conflict settled into a cycle of atrocities->diplomacy->ceasefires->new atrocities->new diplomacy->new ceasefires, on and on. And then in late 2006, the Sri Lankan government essentially said "fuck this", and decided to wage concentrated, merciless, full-throated war against the Tamils. They brought out the kinds of heavy weapons that you usually reserve for wars against foreign states, and they used them without hesitation, and with very little regard for civilian-combatant distinctions. They killed and killed and killed until the LTTE was begging for a ceasefire, which they ignored, and then kept killing until the LTTE was ground into the dirt, their leadership massacred, their leaderships' families massacred, everything destroyed - until the LTTE had no capacity to fight or do anything anymore, at which point the Sri Lankans declared victory, and the war was over.
None of this was "legal" or "ethical" or "moral". Countless crimes against humanity were committed. But the war was over, and has shown no signs of returning in the almost 15 years since its conclusion. No more bombs in public places, no more midnight massacres on farms and villages, no more burning streets. What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer. But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem. We used to know these things - all the population transfers and ethnic cleaning that took place after World War I and World War II were done with the understanding that you cannot expect certain groups to coexist in the same space peacefully for long, and that an atrocity in the present may prevent a greater atrocity in the future. We pretend to know better now, and to what end? To keep money flowing to NGOs, and hand out peace prizes to each other?
Israel would not have this specific problem of Hamas launching attacks from Gaza (that up until now, had been quite comfortably handled). But they might have other problems: a revival of pan-Arabism, a withdrawal of US and western support, the fervent determination of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and maybe Egypt to pursue development of nuclear weapons, etc.
Brutal, overwhelming force might solve one problem, but if in the process that creates three more, you are no farther ahead than when you started.
Israel has long-term plans. God, after all, has promised them the Holy Land, and they see a long-term way to achieve it. Incrementally expanding settlements in the West Bank every year and fighting off a spirited attempt from Hezbollah/Hamas once a decade might be a slow way, but so far it looks like a sure way. They no longer face an existential threat. They've mollified and bought off their formal rivals, and in the process surpassed them. They have ironclad security guarantees and economic support from the world's most powerful countries. Why risk all of that?
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Part of what I think makes Palestine different is that they have hundreds of millions of other Arabs and other muslims supporting them. Once the Tamils were broken, they were broken- they had no path to recovery. But for Palestine, every single member of Hamas could suffer from heart attacks and die tomorrow, and all the weapons could be confiscated, but I don’t think the conflict would be permanently over. Because other groups who want to see Israel ended and Palestine established would work to recreate Hamas or a similar group, providing funding and weapons.
What about 70 million Indian Tamils, why didn't they support the LTTE?
Some support was certainly present.
Local Indian Tamil politicians occasionally campaigned on their behalf, and India even armed them in the 80s. It was India intervening as a peacekeeping force later that made the LTTE turn against them, culminating in the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, at which point the LTTE found itself pretty much friendless, with even their coethnics largely unwilling to touch them with a ten foot pole.
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This feels 10-30 years dated. I don’t get the sense anyone besides a few poors give a shit about Israel in the Middle East now.
Iran and Saudis probably have a few who care but not a majority. Iran cares because a Saudi plus Israel partnership is extremely strong as a regional hegemon. And getting Israel to overreact might cause some issues for the Saudis. Those who care in Saudi society can probably ignored it so long as there are too many dead Palestinians.
I think you underestimate the amount of grass roots support for Palestine. Look at all the protests in Western countries in support of Palestine, before Israel even launched a counter-offensive. A lot of Muslims want to see a free Palestine and want to effectively remove Israel.
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I've long felt that people who talk this way of such things have never engaged with war closer than playing a Paradox game.
Very true, which is why I support the genocide of all landlords and capitalists because they stand in the way of the socialist utopia and would just keep trying to destroy it if we left them alive. In fact, I might even extend this to genociding all humans because they can't stop polluting the earth.
No one is denying that if you kill anyone who opposes you, you can stop fighting instead of continuing a protracted engagement that drains resources and willpower. What is denied is that this is a moral thing to do. Ending war is not inherently a moral good. To have it as a terminal value is the same mistake the pacifists make when they insist the West should voluntarily disarm or leave the Soviets/Russians alone.
In fact, if I was going to be more cynical, I would guess that for some people, any solution to a problem is better than having to keep hearing about it, as if the real sin is that they were asked to pay attention to something other than their own lives. Funny how this forum would reject that idea if it were leftists calling for a ban on anything that cast black people in a negative light because that is a way of fighting racism.
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And what of all the similar conflicts which were resolved without engaging in full-throated war? Northern Ireland is an obvious example. More importantly, this claim:
Is empirically false, because violence between such groups is the exception, not the rule
That is a great argument for assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, but not so great for killing all 2 million residents of the Gaza Strip, "everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers," in order to avoid 600 deaths of Israelis, or even 60,000. Because the latter is not a "greater atrocity" than the former.
A false dichotomy, because I'm pretty sure OP isn't proposing the killing of literally every Palestinian in Gaza, but only the option of killing Hamas, politically involved activists, and optionally, some of their families. I'd be immensely surprised if even that latter broader case encompassed anywhere near a million, maybe twenty or thirty thousand at most before people learned they needed to shut up.
The relevant calculus of death is (Israeli and Palestinian military and civilians who would die if the conflict was allowed to keep boiling) versus (The same class if a brutal campaign ended all appetite for further organized activity).
It seems eminently obvious to me that the former is comparable to the latter, if only because a ton of Palestinians already die because of Hamas provoking Israel.
Then, of course, a more rigorous approach considers second order effects. Of which there are multitudes.
I'm pretty sure OP is proposing precisely that, since OP said, "But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem."
They made the comparison to the Tamil situation, in which the vast vast majority of Sri Lankan Tamils were obviously not killed.
What they said was this:
That is on top of the quote I already cited, re "killing everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers,"
And they also say this: "I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer."
The bottom line is that if there is evidence that OP in fact would not have endorsed the killing of every Sri Lankan Tamil, had that been necessary, I would like to see it. OP is clearly endorsing that very idea.
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I took it to mean that it would be a sufficient solution, at the time, but without any implication that it was necessary today, where far less than the utter annihilation of the Palestinian people will more than suffice.
I'll let him clarify his stance, if he wishes, but just because someone said Genocide X years ago would solve Y problem today, that doesn't mean they're suggesting the very same for Y today.
He is clearly advocating for it in principle. Look at his very first sentence.
@CriticalDuty care to comment to resolve this?
I don't mind it, honestly. But if some level of ethnic cleansing that falls short of total genocide would be an effective solution, then sure, go for that instead. It's worked out plenty of times in the past. What I object to is this idea that everything on that spectrum of atrocities, from population transfers to mass graves, should be declared off-limits.
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Doesn’t the solution to the Troubles and the Good Friday accord speak to an ability to accomplish the same through peace?
Another example would be the Dayton Agreement in the Bosnian War, which specifically established a (creaky, unwieldy) state combining the two recently-slaughtering-each-other national units under one state. Sure, people have predict almost annually that this is the year when it comes to an end and B-H cracks, but it's still standing, remarkably.
To be fair, B-H has a long history of being shoved together under the same imperial suzerain (Ottomans, Habsburgs, Yugoslav communists, etc.) And I'm not sure what, other than pride, would be incentivizing renewed fighting today.
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Just last week there was the police killing/monastery shootout. And the completely unrelated armor, artillery and mechanized border deployment that undeployed for reasons unrelated to international condemnation. Last year was the fight over license plates. Still standing though.
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Pinochet seems like another example though that was ideologically driven.
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Heck, even the end of WWII didn't necessitate the Carthage-like destruction of Germany or Japan. The Allies stated their terms seeking (with very limited exceptions) unconditional surrender, and kept fighting until they got it. The Battle of Berlin was tremendously bloody and maybe even cruel, but seems to have marked a decided tipping point in how the German government (both, for several generations) would act toward Jews, Poles, and Russians. Post-war Japan looks very different from it's Imperial days. Neither people was totally wiped from the face of the Earth.
Of course, if Total Military Defeat were to consistently cause such actions, more recent attempts at such "nation building" would have been more successful. I wish I could say that OPs view is completely wrong, but I can't. It's morally reprehensible, and I really don't like it, but does seem to work sometimes.
W/R/T Germany it did mean the expulsion and resettlement (with significant casualties from hunger, exposure, disease, and criminal predation) of over 10 million ethnic Germans living throughout eastern and central Europe. See, e.g. R. M. Douglas' Orderly and Humane (2013) - just a couple years before a similar, though smaller-scale and less thorough version of the same policy was enacted upon arab residents of the nascent state of Israel in what Palestinians call the nakba, or "catastrophe."
I think OP's argument is that the Israeli fault lies in being less thorough in expelling arabs from a defensible perimeter than the allies and communists were with Germans in eastern europe. I am sympathetic to this argument, though it makes me uncomfortable to admit that, and understand that there are significant differences in the two situations - the arab/palestinian refugees would not have had major military occupations or "Marshall Plan"-style aid as the Germans did, and the strategic situation of Germany (divided in half between the west and the commies, stuck in a geographically-vulnerable middle position) does not describe the strategic geography of the Middle East at all.
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https://www.spiegel.de/international/denmark-s-myths-shattered-a-legacy-of-dead-german-children-a-355772.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
Carthage-like destruction is a fairly accurate summary of what the Allies did to Germany after WWII.
I think you might want to review what actually happened in Carthage. Though I suspect that if you consider denazification to be akin to mass slaughter, you are likely pushing an agenda rather than engaging seriously with the issue at hand.
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I don't think it's comparable, because the British weren't signing a treaty with the IRA. Ireland had a fully-developed spectrum of normal political parties and civil organizations, and they signed the Good Friday Agreement as a reflection of the overwhelming popular desire for peace. After that, any Irish group that wanted further conflict would lack a credible basis to do so. Who are you supposed to talk to in Gaza? Hamas is the only authority there, and the population's views are more aligned with Hamas than peace advocates would care to admit. Peace is nice if you can get it, but when the other side doesn't want it (and probably couldn't agree to it even if they wanted to, being an Iranian proxy), there's not really any solution besides a total purge.
They were, Sinn Féin were a party to the treaty and it couldn't have worked without their participation. Britain signing a deal with Ireland alone wouldn't have changed anything as the Irish state didn't represent nationalists in Northern Ireland nor exert any control over the paramilitaries.
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Presumably the end of the war would have likewise been achieved by the establishment of independent Tamil Eelam.
Yes, any war could be resolved by one side's unilateral surrender. Ukraine could end the war tomorrow too.
As unreasonable as I think it is, I’ve seen pro-Russia posters make that exact argument.
Ukraine anshlussed on generous terms is better for Ukrainians than battered and destroyed Ukraine folded into the Russian state that has lost couple of million of their best people due to emigration or war casualties.
I have not seen shred of evidence that Russia entered the war with genocidal ambitions which doesn't make it that existential for the populace, unlike the state.
If you make the assumption that Russian victory in the meatgrinder is inevitable (big if, but Zelensky is doing his best to make it smaller lately) it is not unreasonable. Even Ukrainian victory may not be worth it if it is pyrrhic enough.
"Ukraine anshlussed" is going to lead to millions of Ukrainians emigrating in any case, and would be a bleeding wound with continuous partisan activity that would require Russia continous brutality to quell.
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It is possible.
Would you apply the same logic to Palestine? I don’t mean this as a gotcha; I was observing above that “one side’s unilateral surrender” is something that gets floated in every conflict. At least every one where the people dying are at a safe distance.
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well, generous terms that would be actually kept are not viable with Russia
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I'm not pro-Russia (who here is?) but yes Ukraine should seek peace and concede territory if necessary. I have little doubt that this would minimize human suffering.
The counterargument seems to be something along the lines of "We need teach Russia a lesson so they won't do it again. Remember Munich!"
Which is silly. Russia lacks the capacity to do it again.
I find the arguments of the warmongers very unconvincing. The use of the pejorative "pro-Russia" to describe those who would have peace feels like manufacturing consensus.
Even in my wildest anti-Russian fantasies do I not believe that Russia, if given a peace and concessions instead of some kind of "a lesson", would lack the capacity to do it again.
Exactly, if the war ceases right now at the current lines, Russia's ability to rearm stays constant or improves (as sanctions loosen or their enforcement becomes more lax). Ukraine's drops precipitously off a cliff as Western support evaporates. Ukraine needs Russia to see the invasion as being routed and done, not merely paused, because Russia will find itself in a more advantageous position in the future, and Ukraine needs the mental barrier of "starting a war of aggression on a neighbor" to be back in place, preferably with a little extra bracing from that neighbor having kicked their asses, to hope it doesn't get restarted again.
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Minimizing the present value of human suffering is not, and never has been, the primary aim of a nation at war.
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There are at least a few around. More if you count the ones who gesture at how terrible Russia’s actions are only as a justification for telling Ukraine to surrender.
I don’t think “pro-Russia” is a pejorative any more than “pro-Ukraine.”
none of those are examples of being "pro Russian" and I doubt any of them would self-identify as pro-Russian
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You would have many other exciting problems. I doubt that mass murder of X million people is actually effective.
Hitler tried, and as far as curbing Jewish political power and influence, or as increasing power of Germany, or as taking Lebensraum, or as promoting eugenics and purity of german race - all that goals failed miserably. Despite actually murdering millions of people.
(and for ethics: I reject genocide as a solution)
Germans were thrown out of lots of territories post-WWII where they had historically lived.
This worked.
Yes, exiling people tends to work better and successes are more common there.
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Mostly as a revenge for Germans themselves attempting to conquer and settle into their neighbors' territories. Am I the only one who sees Germans as more analogous to the other side in this conflict?
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I don't think Israel needs to literally kill everyone, but they do need to institute some sort of radical de-Palestinization. Go in, establish total martial law, destroy all mosques, convert the entire population to Bnei Noach, ban the Arabic language. These people got self-government and immediately voted a literal terrorist cell into power. Israel has no reason to treat Gaza any more leniently that the Allies treated Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.
I wonder if modern communication and widespread prevalence of Islam will lead this to be less effective than your examples.
Like with Nazi Germany, the main source of Nazi ideology was Germany itself: if you wanted to learn about Naziism you had to go up against the occupation authorities that were against that. And even if there were Nazi groups that weren't repressed in Italy or something, you'd have a hard time finding and learning from them.
But that's clearly not going to happen here: Islam exists in many countries across the world and will explicitly talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict, so there's always going to be a supply of Islam for anyone in Palestine who wants to learn it.
Keeping it repressed doesn't just mean tearing down the mosques, it means keeping Palestinians from accessing the mosques in other countries, which would mean an unrealistic crackdown on all communication technology in the country, and probably needing to maintain that crackdown perfectly for decades against people from other countries actively seeking to break it.
There are further differences that seem to support your theory.
Nazism was also denounced by practically the entire world, or at least by those parts of it that had much influence. Since Islam counts as a religion and all parts of the world that have much influence have agreed that religions require protection, Islam receives protection in most of the world whereas Nazism did not.
The other very obvious difference is that Nazism had maybe a decade to take root, whereas Islam has had a good 1300 years. Nobody but a handful of German children, and those only briefly, experienced Nazism as a natural fact of life, whereas Islam is in the soil and water of much of the world.
The two don't really compare at all. So I'd agree with you.
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On the other hand... Japan surrendered to the US! How were the Japanese able to swallow their pride in the face of total nuclear annihilation and decide that bending their knee to the West and adopting all of their customs was better than going down in a blaze of glory? But yet the Palestinians find this utterly unthinkable?
The Japanese weren't all initially able to do so. Tens of thousands of soldiers tried to kidnap their Emperor and assassinate their Prime Minister to stop the surrender, and that was after two nukes (plus a few tens of millions of incendiary bomblets) had already been dropped.
After that, though ... was the institution of the Japanese Emperor a blessing in disguise? Anti-terrorist tactics consider "decapitation strikes" killing enemy leaders to be high-value goals, but if there's nobody left at the top who's respected enough to order the foot soldiers to stand down then ipso facto the foot soldiers never stand down. From a moral standpoint it feels like assassinating a "mastermind" is greater justice than killing tons of poor grunts who merely got persuaded or coerced onto the front lines, but maybe the rules of war are more useful in the long run than the rules of anti-terrorism, if wars can come to an end but terrorism just goes on and on?
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Because Hirohito was more sensible than any member of Hamas (and perhaps any Palestinian).
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Two reasons:
The Japanese were not displaced from their homeland and only temporarily lost control of Japan after their defeat. The Palestinians lost both their homes and control of Palestine permanently.
The emperor surrendered unilaterally against the wishes of his advisors. There is no god emperor in Gaza to make the Palestinians surrender against popular sentiment.
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I’d guess it’s because Japan’s entire people were on the line, whereas Hamas identifies with other Arabs/Muslims such that the loss of Palestine doesn’t mean total defeat.
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If they managed to find some countries that were willing to take in millions of Palestinians, the Israelis maybe would be able to pull off a soft ethnic cleansing. But they could not pull off a murderous, "kill everybody" genocide without alienating a very large fraction of their current supporters, including Jewish ones. Israel would become similar to what North Korea is today. It would probably not collapse, but it would have big difficulties in retaining nearly as many high-skilled, intelligent people as it has now unless it made it illegal for them to leave the country, and it would have bigger difficulties in convincing Jews from elsewhere to move there than it does now. Only the most hardcore patriots would want to live in an armed camp that is known for having recently committed one of modern history's biggest genocides, and I doubt that the overlap between such hardcore patriots and the kind of high-skilled, intelligent people who are the bedrock of any sophisticated modern economy is very large. Which is not to say that there are no intelligent pro-genocide people, of course. There are plenty. But they are an exception. In the heat of the moment after having had your nation attacked, almost anyone could feel genocidal desire. I think it's likely that a huge number of otherwise compassionate Israelis feel that way right now, for example. But there's a difference between feeling it every now and then and actually being ok with your military doing it and seeing the videos of what it looks like. Even the Nazis tried to keep the Holocaust a secret from both Germans and people in other countries, but in today's world there would be no way to keep a violent genocide of Palestinians a secret.
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Ethnic cleansing was done before, even with tacit agreement of USA. One such example is Operation Storm that took place on the tail end of Balkan Wars, where Croats basically ethnically cleansed the area that was the stronghold of autonomous republic of Serbs. Croats killed several hundreds of Serbs and basically evicted hundreds of thousands from their land.
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There's good reason that Britain pacified Afghanistan in the 19th century with far weaker supply chains and less glaring technological disparities, while it and the rest of NATO left in the 21st with their tail tucked between their legs.
Violence is the voice of the unheard, but it's also a universal language. If you can't solve most problems with violence, you're not using enough, and quite often, or at least here, a more dispassionate analysis will show that a quick burst of brutal violence obviates the need for more down the line.
At any rate, I think Western countries are cowardly in large part because most of the wars they've fought of late don't matter, lacking the stakes of their populations being genocided or living conditions cratering.
Yes, there is really no war that cannot be won by killing enough of the enemy. Only the number that counts as ‘enough’ and the precise definition of ‘enemy’ vary. Less than 2000 American soldiers died in Afghanistan, it simply wasn’t a serious war. More Israelis have likely died since Saturday.
Citation needed.
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I find it ironic that you prefer the Israeli way of doing things that excludes you while you want to migrate to the west which if it followed the logic you praise, would rightfully exclude you from it.
But your logic in favor of nationalist violence implies far more besides that. Lets just say your general stance is completely incoherent. Is nationalist violence good when the Israelis do it only, or do you secretly find the west stupid for not being more hostile to you? Although the implications of your rhetoric of more violence no problems raises far more negative implications about what global powers should do. Or even specific countries fearing a dismal fate for their people in the future. Or should have done in the past.
I don't actually agree but I do think enough force and hostility is needed against those who deserve it and to promote civilization and justice. But adoring violence as the solution is wrongheaded and leads to a world under fire and predation of inoccents. Which you show no concern to avoiding. Obviously not letting someone with your backstabbing mentality come to the west would be the sane course. And stopping mass migration of foreigners in general. Which is good in general. But say some white nationalist when India had no nukes wanting to nuke India because they sew it as a threat would be an extremely immoral conduct.
I fail to see any sincere philosophical appreciation for violence and tribalism here. Rather, you are sucking up to Jewish ultra-nationalism.
Not in the least, since I intend to go through legal channels as about the most Westernized an Indian can get, contributing to a valuable profession, and generally being prosocial. My idle musings about my potential path to American citizenship, should it ever materialize, was met with almost unanimous approval from pretty much every side of the political compass, be it here or on Reddit.
Can you say the same for the typical Palestinian? Hardly.
Case by case please. Certainly no to the latter, since they would be turning down a win-win deal.
Ah yes, you (might) have genuine appreciation for the Palestinian cause, I suck up to the Jews. Well, if Mossad wants to pay me, I'll take it, I'm circumcized for medical reasons, but close enough! I am hardly uncritical of the Jews as a whole, given that they formented much of Western Wokism despite it now biting them in the ass.
I made no claim to show "sincere philosophical appreciation for violence and tribalism" at all, so you're forgiven for missing it.
What I am saying is that I prefer the outcome of Israeli dominion and pacification of the contested territories, and I don't particularly care about how they go about it. I do not think violence is anti-sacred and verboten, it's just as fungible as most things are as far as I'm concerned. Tribalism? If you deny that Jews, even those in Israel, have contributed much more to the globe than all their neighbors put together, then sure, you can abuse the term.
Please try to look for more subtle arguments than those before you claim that support for a particular nation engaging in violence and "tribalism" extends to universal adulation of such. It all depends on the outcome.
Why should I, as an American, give you the benefit of that doubt? Why shouldn't I just assume that you're some basket-weaver taking a shit on the streets of Calcutta, or fresh from participating in a gang rape in some rural village? There are over one billion Indians and I'd bet very few of them are pro-Western doctors. Why are you privileged to paint all Palestinians with a broad brush, but I'm not privileged to paint all Indians with a broad brush?
You can give me whatever you like, it matters not in the least unless you're my immigration officer.
Besides, while I'm just as fond of rhetoric as the next person, I'm pretty certain you know that's not true.
And if it's not true, then I suggest you wait till evidence arises that I'm street-shitting in California and not Calcutta, though the former is a cherished pan-American tradition practised by junkies and hobos of any ethnicity. Surprising few Indians among them, to be sure, but if that's not additional reason to support Affirmative Action in immigration to mitigate disparities, what is?
You're missing the point. If you're advocating that Palestinians should be painted with a broad brush based on their worst stereotypes, then why shouldn't Indians be given the same treatment? Your argument presupposes I treat you as an individual, while you want to deny such treatment to any individual from Gaza.
Am I? I have very little outright animosity against a Palestinian who doesn't support Hamas, I think it's a shame they're caught up in the conflict. Yet clearly they're not numerous or vocal enough to be in charge, or they'd have chased them out of town after tarring and feathering them.
For what it's worth, I don't think Israeli reprisals are utterly indiscriminate, while innocents will be caught in the crossfire, I expect those who die to be selected from Hamas than their allies far more than a random sampling would expect. The friends and family being blown up with a Hamas terrorist are significantly more likely to be sympathizers. As for hospitals and schools, with a captive population, perhaps Hamas should reconsider stashing their ammunition there, in a calculated move to curry international favor when Israel blows them up.
Evidently that's enough for me to look the other way, or even cheer for the Israelis. I deny that your analogy works at all really.
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Because that would be unnecessarily antagonistic, which is against the rules.
By way of explanation, I was trying to highlight the most uncharitable view of his countrymen that I could think of in order to illustrate a point. I tend to be pro-Israel, but the repeated calls on this board for treating every Gazan as a Hamas terrorist up to the point of advocating for summary execution without evidence or even requirement of specific wrongdoing based on the assumption that all of them are predisposed towards violence rubs me the wrong way. While I understand there's a difference between making broad statements about groups on the other side of the world and actually singling out individual posters, one of my problems with the more racist-leaning elements on this board is that advocating for certain policies is easy when you assume that only other people will be affected by them. I don't put @self_made_human into this category, nor do I assume he is of the character I alluded to. The comment certainly wasn't intended to offend, but I believe I have more contact with actual hoi polloi working-class conservatives than the average poster here, and I can assure you that the kind of people who take the position he's advocating for are the same kind of people who refuse to patronize gas stations owned by Indians and Pakistanis and complain about local Nepali refugees meditating on their lawns. Anyway, I apologize.
Well, there are, uh, a lot of posts happening on this topic so I apologize if this sort of thing is genuinely slipping through. I don't see every comment that gets reported, and there are other moderators, but I, at least, have yet to see a single comment in the queue that meets this description, even though I've seen several comments in the queue claiming that this sentiment is being expressed here, somewhere.
(I don't doubt that some comments might be reasonably interpreted this way, but presentation matters. So long as no one explicitly says "all Gazans should be assumed terrorists and shot on sight," less direct claims like "I just don't see how Israel has clear options when it comes to clearly distinguishing between guilty Hamas and innocent Gazans, here" should be interpreted more charitably.)
(I also tend to object to people making sweeping characterizations of "this board" while themselves disclaiming such characterizations; you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. The way you've done it here is relatively mild, but still, I don't think it is beneficial for you, or anyone, to approach conversations here as me-against-the-Motte's-hivemind.)
I don't necessarily mind thought experiments that encourage people to put themselves in someone else's shoes, either, but still it would probably be best to not illustrate those thoughts in terms of the direct personal application of an unflattering stereotype of a user's professed identity.
For what it's worth, I think this comment from over the weekend, and its relative lack of pushback, is what may be leading people to believe that people are saying things like this.
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Dude, you support mass murder and are praising a state that excludes you from it for its nationalism.
You are definitely a hypocrite.
You are an antiwestern racist who doesn't respect the native peoples human rights to national self determiantion and sovereignity and have said you would vote for the political party the democrats which is the most unhinged in said direction. Also, you are not part of the Western people you are replacing and making a minority in their own country but part of the colonization and discrimination. When you arrive to the USA you will benefit from discrimination in your favor and join the forces of discrimination against the natives. Which you are screwing by displacing and replacing in their own land.
Your migration is not the same as small migration from and towards a country that respects it self, and is sustainble, but part of colonization.
The Israelis care about numbers and not being overwhelmed by foreign ethnic groups and you praise them for it. Why? Because you are hypocritical.
I show no bias in favor of the Palestinians by opposing mass murder and foreign occupation. I attacked the Palestinians for having a muslim fanatical imperialist mentality, actually. I dislike both Hamas, have a negative view about the fanaticism of Muslims in general, and dislike Israel, have a negative view of Jewish fanaticism in general. I am very much willing to condemn different factions. I complained about historical nazis, I complained about the groups I mentioned, I oppose those with a pushover mentality and I oppose those who are fanatical violent racist supremacists for foreign groups too. Or even for their own.
Its like there is a choice outside of this scumbag behavior that one can choose.
Just cause you support genocide and mass violence in favor of the Jews, don't mistake your own indecency for those of others.
You really are a non Jew who favors Jewish supremacy and mass murder in Israel. Own for it. Now as for why you are sucking up to Jewish extremism, is part of your antiwestern agenda, since the western establishment pushes the same racism against natives and unhinged racism in favor of the Jews as you do. You are willing to support mass murder and Jewish ultranationalism for social status within circles that Jewish supremacy has some valiance like the rationalists.
In any case your racist double standards and hypocricy betrays your lack of philosophical sophistication.
Is that you being the westernized Indian? Supporting mass murder as something to not care about and push aside? Maybe like the Jewish migrants in Palestine, you will support this logic against the natives of the western country you will live in. Seems you are quite willing to support colonialism, if it serves your interest.
Masss murder and ultranationalists who abuse the human rights of others winning is worth it because reasons, is not a valid argument.
The Germans hold records of patents per capita in europe and the Japanese were also much more succdessful than other Asians. And the British contributed much more to humanity than India in modernity. Is mass murder in favor of ethnic domination of these countries good then? Should the British have pacified India harder? What kind of abuse of logic is this?
Israel will still be standing without committing atrocities against the Palestinians. You have never come close to making the work to justify your claims in favor of mass murder.
I am glad you exposed how you and others here are Jewish supremacists. Oh the crocodile tears spent about certain forms of extremism when a different one is the most common one instead.
And your way of thinking would justify a smarter group going around the globe murdering the natives and replacing them everywhere, while promoting hardcore fertility for themselves.
All the liberal ideology you aligned with is hollow. You know what you support aligns more with, right?
It is insane to support mass murder of Palestinians because you consider Jews superior.
While, I think HBD is true, and the anti HBD ers want to silence it so they can get away with being racists under the "overepresentation is due to oppression" narrative, it does seem that when it comes to the Jews in particular we do have HBD leading to the most vile extremism of you and others supporting mass murder which is a very real danger that has materialized.
Although, I think a narrative with HBD is partly to blame and the general ideology of Jewish superiority and they can do no wrong is also directly related. The narrative that connects human biological difference with the right to destroy other groups because yours is superior does deserve to be a taboo. I still am against antiHBDism ideology and the narrative it connects with, but a certain ideology related with HBD should also be kept down.
Remind me why should I care? I have no plans on going to Israel, except on vacation. After they've dealt with people bombing the concerts, and not just with poor reviews.
The fact that it nominally discriminates against me, yet I still support it, ought to show that I have principles beyond whether or not one side or another is rooting for me.
Now, do tell me how the Palestinians would react to an atheist Indian from a culturally Hindu background shacking up with them? Assuming I was daft enough to. Let's hope the circumcision pulls its weight again.
A pro-western racist, or at least a believer in HBD making most claims of rampant racism obsolete in the West, come on dawg. Don't tell me that that is disqualifying for citizenship, or else a large chunk of the West would have to relocate.
What does your inability to see that people can and do care about very different things than you do say about you?
I am large. I contain multitudes.
Agree to disagree?
I suppose it's yet another forgivable sin to not read every single comment posted on the Motte, but rest assured that I am on record stating that I believe that a counterfactual world where the British remained in charge of India for decades longer than 1947 would likely have lead to a better outcome, at least for the Indians.
If the Brits and Germans were fighting somebody as profoundly unsympathetic as I find the Palestinians, then sure? Say what you will about India, but we give back more than we take, especially in the talented diaspora I hope to represent.
Vice-versa.
If they're accused of murdering the natives, they're not putting their all into it. Then again, the Jews came first, so they're the oppressed native people fighting for the side of freedom and liberty /s
Once again, I never claimed to be a liberal. At most, I'm a classical liberal, with libertarian sympathies, and I could add a dozen more qualifiers to that list. Your attempt to fit me into a convenient bucket leaves my limbs, my dick, and most of my brains sticking out.
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While I think you have a point about the forgotten utility of full scale war, I wouldn't characterize the suppression of Tamils in Sri Lanka as a genocide. Nor does the Israeli's potential suppression of the Palestinians require the moniker. That's simply edginess on your part.
I won't split hairs over terminology. Regardless of the moniker, we live in an age where any useful action has been deemed verboten by our modern understanding of martial morality. This grants an advantage to any group that lacks similar moral compunctions.
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What seems to be needed is some kind of uh, ultimate, uh, resolution, of the uh, Jewish problem[ of non-Jews existing in their vicinity]. Perhaps one of the greatest question that has ever posed itself to uh, Jews. So to speak. Some form of uh, physical removal?
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The Jews are one of the groups closest to your mentality actually based on both rhetoric and action. There is a constrain related to muslim world having its own similar solidarity and fanaticism. And where do you expect Palestinians to go as they are further ethnically cleansed and mass murdered as per your final solution? How is this better for the people involved who are mass murdered? And how would after the crimes you advocate be done, avoid things like what happened in Lebanon after mass migration of Palestinians there?
Genocide as the end of ethnic conflict is myopic way of seeing it. In actuality, genocidal empires are prone to find another group and do to them likewise. Moreover, historically one group out to genocide X leads to Z acting similiarly and you get mass murder. Such escalatory spilar reached that point to begin with because that was the favorable course. That is, if groups follow a greedy path to the extreme, you are going to get ethnic conflict. Although yeah ethnic conflict is rather plausible in non homogeneous societies with human tribalism being what it is. That is why progressive supremacists support diversity because they want to create a coalition to lord over and oppress the native people.
Of course, I would not suggest that people should be pushovers. But the Jews are not the group that are pushovers, to the contrary they benefit from others being pushovers towards their own aggression. And of course from unhinged rhetoric of non Jews in favor of Jewish extremism. Tolerance of Jewish fanaticism is the reason that Israel has escalated the situation already this far. As for the Palestinians, the Islamic fanatics of Hamas also provide no happy solutions.
The best historical solution to the conflict was to keep these two people separate in two seperate states controlled by more moderate nationalists over the current leadership.
In the current case, Israel avoiding massive warcrimes like people here advocate is the sane immediate next step. Already their rhetoric about animals, destroying gaza strip, removing water. Rather than seeking reprisals towards military targets, there is the logic of racist annihilation of the ethnic enemy.
It does show that all the rhetoric of so, so, so many here about bad nationalism, tolerance, human rights, genocide denial of 80 year old genocides being of such a moral afront, being nice, whines about racism etc, etc are just the hollow words of hypocrites who align with the most unhinged nationalism and racism of a Jewish hue and even from a political coalition of the far right that is particularly and genuine extreme in said direction.
And of course that you can get away with this rhetoric in favor of mass murder and genocide against the Palestinians without a ban is precisely because of what group you have chosen to target. It's why it would be a good thing if the kind of people who run institutions, including internet forums started to get punished for the kind of unhinged bipartisan (i.e. progressive supremacist or Israeli jewish supremacist) extremism they have been tolerating and encouraging.
People here unironically care and are more passionate in arguing about people denying past genocide involving the jews, than people promoting current genocides in favor of the Jews.
I don't know about others, but I argue against Holocaust deniers not because I have any sort of pro-Jewish agenda but simply because I think that Holocaust denial theories are very implausible and most people who adhere to them do so for emotional reasons rather than intellectual ones. So when I see them, I have the same kind of mental reaction that I would if someone came here and started arguing that the Apollo moon landing never happened, or if someone started arguing that Christianity is literally true.
You can probably get away with arguing for mass murder and genocide of pretty much any group here as long as you write it in a sufficiently dispassionate-sounding, academic style.
I do find unhinged pro-genocide rants distasteful, but so far at least, somewhat to my surprise, I haven't actually seen anything too barbaric here. Maybe I just need to keep reading this thread further, lol. It would not surprise me to see some.
Or maybe spending a lot of time on 4chan has made Motteizens' occasional murderous rants seem relatively tame to me in comparison.
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I’m not convinced that it’s the genocide part that’s important. The solution is to break the will of people to continue to resist. It can be done without killing everyone, but it has to be done with exactly that goal in mind — by the time the smoke clears the very idea of attempting to start a battle with the other side should be unthinkable.
This is exactly correct, and I think it is the true aim of some of the Israeli leadership at this point. That breaking point may be very far along the line however, given the experiences of the 20th century, and I'm not convinced the Israelis have the will to go as far as they will need to.
The analogy above someone used of the war with Japan is a good one: in that case the US acted continually as if their goal was the complete subjugation of the Japanese people at any cost, if not through unconditional surrender then by annihilation. That approach works, but you have to follow it - you can't bluff at it.
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So you are interested in enough mass murder so Palestinians will accept anything Jews do and will never even think of attempting to start a battle with the other side.
I am pretty sure you are pointing trivialities and it is the genocide you support as a solution that is important and not the fact that it leads to the defeat of your enemy like you pretend.
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The Arab League needs to follow Sri Lanka's example for the sake of peace. 🕊️
They tried. Of course, an essential component of the strategy is that you are able to win in a straight up war.
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A pro-Palestine rally in Sydney has featured the same kind of naked antisemitism that is increasingly common at these sorts of events - in this case including chants of "fuck the Jews".
However, unlike America which has a first amendment to protect offensive speech, Australia is not so squeamish about cracking down on wrongthink. Conservatives tried (and failed) some years back to change the federal law that makes it illegal to "offend or insult" a person on the basis of race, and state-based racial vilification laws carry criminal penalties. States recently have been banning the swastika and other Nazi symbols too.
So, how does this get applied when the racial vilification is coming from Labor-voting Muslims rather than One Nation-voting whites? Well, we got an indication today:
To be clear, I supported the unsuccessful move to amend the Racial Discrimination Act and generally think that expressing odious views should not be illegal. But I'm also a big believer in the even handed application of law, and given that the country decided to reject the argument that "people have a right to be bigots" (as Brandis put it), I'm going to give myself a pass to enjoy watching some of the less pleasant parts of society get an involuntary legal education.
The question I keep coming back to when I see these pro-Palestinians-murdering-Jews rallies is, "why are these people here?". That's my instinctual response to seeing this in New York, Toronto, Sidney, really any nice, polite, Anglo-founded civilization. Don't get me wrong, I understand why they want to be here, there's all sorts of material goods to be gained by moving to nice, polite, Anglo-founded civilizations. What I mean is how did we wind up with a set of policies that allowed immigration of people that were going to bring their old ethnic hatreds and import them to nice, polite, Anglo civilizations. I can't really begrudge black Americans for holding a grudge over American history and I certainly will grant that Native Americans have a point or two. But why the hell did we add a set of people with Middle Eastern grievances to celebrate the barbaric murder of Jews?
This is, of course, rhetorical and I am familiar with the history of immigration in these countries, but I just can't get past that being my sentiment every time. Whether people have a right to be bigots or not, Sydney didn't need to invite them in to do on the steps of the Opera House. The people that want to engage in desert barbarism should be doing so in said desert, not in Times Square.
Many Irish-Americans supported the IRA, and indeed one can imagine, Native Americans complaining about why these Anglos came here and brought all their nonsense from the Old World, with their Protestants and Catholics and Monarchists and so on.
You're starting from a premise that Anglos didn't bring their grievances with them, and I don't think that is clearly true. In fact the truth is, I think everywhere we go, (people in general) we always bring our grievances with us. From Puritan settlers to Quakers and on, you can see those grievances impact on today. Why do you think PA has such restrictive liquor laws compated to say Texas?
We can just over a long enough period, replace our old grievances with new ones that better fit our new situation. It just takes time.
Give it a minute and just like Irish-Americans complaining more about blacks in Boston, or Polacks somewhere else, everyone will get proper new grievances against the people next door instead. Yes, yes Israel is bad, but have you seen that they want to put a half way house just down from the mosque?
Yeah, and it wasn't great!
As above, I think the Natives have something of a point. If nothing else, I surely wouldn't be inclined to tell them that it's actually pretty normal and that they're a bunch of bigots for not welcoming it. The parallels obviously stop making sense in short order, but I think we can confidently say that the squabbles of Europeans being brought to Americans shores sucked for the people that were the previous residents of those shores.
They certainly did, and it does suck, but complaining about 1 group doing it when every other group does the same is an isolated demand for rigor.
To be clear, it is not good. But it is entirely normal. Its not about Anglos and Middle Easterners, its about people.
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My views largely align with yours. I wish Australia had true freedom of speech backed in our Constitution. Alas, looks like I'll have to settle for
your rules applied fairlyyour rules selectively applied to benefit you.This is a great example of selective enforcement and Who Whom. White nationalists would never be allowed to undertake the same protest. Particularly without filing a 'Form 1' with NSW Police (or Notice of Intention to Hold a Public Assembly) as was the case with the Pro-Palestinian rally.
Beyond this, this type of ethnic tension is endemic in multi-cultural societies. As I said recently regarding the Sikh assassination in Canada, political agitators who cannot leave their old countries' grudges at the door when emigrating to the West should fail the character test and be denied citizenship.
This is going to fail the disparate impact test - and it'll probably count as antisemitic too given how many jews are Israeli partisans. I happen to agree with you that it is a good idea, but you're not going to be able to get the left to agree to a policy that effectively translates to mostly allowing white and asian immigrants.
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Which is interesting considering how people openly talk about genociding Palestinians. They aren't really shown as humans and politicians openly talk about how they various war crimes should be commited against them. Funny how talking about turning Gaza into glass isn't hate speach but we aren't allowed to criticise the people of Israel. I hardly think the police would crack down on fuck the Russians at a pro Ukraine rally.
Right wingers get kicked off twitter for proposing mild measures to reduce immigration. Israelis can cheer on mass bombing of Palestinians, blocking food and electricity to civilians and demolishing their homes and churches without consequence.
Could you show me some examples of politicians saying what you believe to the the equivalent here?
I’ve certainly seen things about bombing Gaza, but this comes immediately after a terrorist attack, and there is an implied “let/force the civilians to leave”.
Here's a politician in the Israeli legislature from Netanyahu's party Likud calling for Israel to use their nuclear weapons rather than ground forces. "Doomsday weapons" is the thinly veiled euphemism Israelis often use to refer to their officially unacknowledged but open secret nuclear arsenal.
https://twitter.com/TallyGotliv/status/1711426284322996613
Twitter has decided not to translate that for me.
It’s certainly a strong opinion.
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After seeing those Khaazar Milkers, I'm sympathetic. Unless you also intend to tell me that the "gas the Jews" chanting alongside it wasn't intended to be an invitation to huff nitrous, an authentic Australian pastime if I've heard one.
Honestly, one of the primary benefits of the US seceding from British influence by force was a ground-up reconstruction of its legal system and implicit constitution. While the average Westerner who doesn't think too hard might look at comparable standards of living in the Commonwealth and the US, they have very different presumptions underlying their judicial system and tolerance for political incorrectness.
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I live in a very progressive part of the US. I had a moment earlier today when I was surrounded by some Jewish community members/friends, and they were talking about how difficult it's been at work for them this week, because they have to put up with many of their coworkers saying "horrible things" (read: things that they don't agree with regarding the recent events). These community members are the same people who went spouting all manners of progressive talking points in so many inappropriate and unnecessary contexts over the past 5 or so years, from BLM, to covid, to Trump derangement syndrome, and so many more issues.
I'm sure I wouldn't like what these people's coworkers are saying, but I find myself feeling more than ever wanting to say to these people, "So what? You can't have everyone agree with you". I guess I'm now an expert at being around people who say things that make my blood boil. I put up with progressives at work, in my social circles, in my local community events, in stores, who constantly barrage me with their unsolicited progressive message. I not only never say anything anymore, but I act as if I'm completely unbothered. As a result, I find myself having very little sympathy, but a lot of empathy for these pro Israel progressives. I'm sure the irony is completely lost on them, but it makes me wonder how certain people can go through life with so little perspective that they feel so put upon by people with different viewpoints, yet cannot fathom that they may make others feel that way with their own, and that maybe they're wrong to do so.
Because, from their perspective, they’re obviously right, and everyone else is obviously either evil or straight up insane. Yes, enough exposure to contrary evidence might change their minds. But they don’t have it.
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There’s a lot of wiggle room in “things that they don’t agree with”. The last week has had a lot of public statements that range from disagreements on strategy and ethics for a difficult ground war to questions related to the cycle of violence to ‘that live-streamed mass shooting was faked and if it wasn’t it was a political conspiracy‘ to literally complaining The Final Solution didn’t go far enough. The imprecision of the rest of your post does not really make clear what you’re engaged with.
There’s perhaps a steelman where even the most extreme sides of that spectrum did not have a even or honest application against the Red Tribe (both that Damore was not tolerated, and that the Blue Tribe equivalents to Alex Jones were), and I’d probably agree with you for a significant part of it. But outside of the irony of it all, I don’t really see how much info there is in people only noticing when their ox is on the line.
That tweet got memory-holed.
Archive.
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You're singing my song. I've had to deal with this over, and over, and over, and over. It's tiresome. The most common incarnation is when they're not sure they can enjoy the work of this celebrity or that celebrity anymore because they did something that was insensitive to this group or that group.
You ask "how certain people can go through life with so little perspective that they feel so put upon by people with different viewpoints, yet cannot fathom that they may make others feel that way with their own, and that maybe they're wrong to do so." (I'm tired and so I'm using direct quotes.) The answer is that.. "it's just different". People who reason emotionally will use their emotions as a justification, and if you can get them to verbalize it, they'll say "it's just different."
All people see themselves as the center of their universe, but only a minority recognize that they do. If you see yourself as the center of the universe and have no cause to correct for that assumption, decisions of "right" and "wrong" will be based entirely on emotion, all the time. No meta level reasoning necessary, because it's not like your feelings can be wrong.
I'm not rational. But I admire rationalists. And that so many people flagrantly disregard the need to be less biased irritates me to no end.
Not only that, but that person is also bombarded nearly non-stop with progressive messaging. Media, Universities, Federal Government, and social circles are all telling this person that they are 100% correct.
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What are their coworkers saying that your Jewish friends think is ‘horrible’? I can’t imagine people are saying genuine pro-Hamas stuff in a progressive regular workplace in the US, this isn’t a decolonial reading circle at Columbia.
Thankful as ever it would be considered weird to discuss politics seriously in my workplace.
You might need to expand your imagination, though it's mostly as @haroldbkny says, stuff about Israel being to blame because of their oppression of the Palestinians. Me, I stay out of that, if there's going to be sectarian violence between the Muslims and the Jews at the workplace, I don't want to be around.
(Ha ha no, it's not really the Muslims who are posting stuff like that; our Muslims are not Palestinian and mostly not even Arab. It's white people)
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I think in the context of the conversation I was having, it was mostly regarding people saying that Israel was to blame for any and all violence Hamas may do. It's also worth noting that some of the people involved work at universities, where such sentiment is more common.
How many of those Jews offended by this terrible statement were fully onboard with the George Floyd riots? The party line was that those riots were the language of the unheard, a reaction to oppression, and a civil rights movement. How many George Floyd's have Israeli police or soldiers made in Gaza?
A person who supported BLM riots, who is progressive politically, but has found a sudden sympathy for using military action to reduce wanton violence by a marginalized minority?
At my work I work with some religious Jews. To a one, they hated the riots.
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With the reports of Egypt notifying Israel in advance of an impending attack, people here and elsewhere have wondered if Bibi maybe let the attack slip through on purpose to consolidate power. Overnight he went from dealing with protests against his judicial reforms and the draft to having those problems disappear and securing the full backing of a broad unity government with his former opposition.
But Jerusalem Post just released a pretty damning poll:
Is there any way for Bibi to hold onto power? If not, what might the future look like?
If he knew it was coming the way to consolidate power would have been a thousand Palestinians dead in the attack, a handful of civilians, and a 100 IDF. Looking extremely competent as you crush a massive attack as it happens boost support. Instead he looks incompetent. I guess you would make Hamas think your weak but have everything in place to crush the attack.
The only 4-D chess move for letting the attack happen would be getting the world to accept that Palestine and Israel can not exists together and getting global community to look the other way as you create 2 million refugees and someone like Egypt reluctantly accepting them.
Egypt wont accept them, though. Sane regimes don’t let millions of terrorists in, and Hamas is literally a splinter group from Al-Sisi’s main opposition.
To say nothing of the usual prejudices against Palestinians.
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I think most likely you're right.
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I think Netanyahu's going to retire or be shoved out of the public sphere regardless of what extent he 'knew' an attack was coming. The pre-October doctrine where Gaza was left to Hamas with business relations, a jobs program, and occasional missile exchanges and shooting atrocities was Netanyahu's brainchild, a major bet that no matter Hamas' public doctrine it wouldn't do anything as an organization outside of The Usual. It was a sad and bloody sort of 'deescalation', where a 'win' for Hamas was a gentleman's agreement for the Israeli's to not explode every member of Hamas' senior leadership, but they had eight years of that and it was a lot nicer for Hamas leadership than exploding, and the rule brought everyone to this.
((Separately, the emphasis on the failed judicial reform bill in a lot of these theories is kinda goofy. Netanyahu didn't win, but neither did Biden get a SCOTUS expansion. They gambled some political capital and lost; it's not the end of the world.))
I'm not sure what you mean by either of these, Netanyahu was successful in his judicial reform bill, pending SC review; Biden was against the SCOTUS expansion and never tried.
I think it's more the optics of six months of large scale protests disapearing overnight, but I agree that wouldn't have driven Bibi to do something so crazy. I think it might've been unclear, but part of why I made that post was to illustrate how unlikely it was that he let the attack go through given that polls show what many people would have suspected, that it was bad for his own own political future.
Agreed with all the rest of your post.
Times of Israel reports
Two months after the claim I responded to but thank you for the update on the situation!
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For historical reference Golda Meir (Mapai->Labor) was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin (Alignment->Labor) but her and her party did retain power though there were less domestic political issues plaguing Labor as a whole then and they did drop in parliament seats compared to before the war.
That’s a helpful comparison, thanks.
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Is Bibi really in control, does he really have any power?
Everyone here knows gentile conspiracy theories claiming that everything and everyone are controlled by Freemasons, Illuminati and lizard people, who are in turn controlled by (((you know who))).
Let me now enlighten this thread a little bit and present here authentically Jewish Pizzagate tier conspiracy theory well known in Israel.
Netanyahu is controlled by ... his wife Sara.
Video alleges contract between PM, wife gives her veto over Mossad, IDF chiefs
Notice that Sara is not looking very Jewish.
Trust the plan.
This is the most jewish concept I've read about in a year. A "contract" between her and her husband for control of isreal?????
Imagine trying to enforce it in court.
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Why would he sign such a contract?
Men sign disadvantageous contracts with women all the time. It usually involves a ceremony and whatnot.
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And why it would matter?
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The reports that Netanyahu[1] knew about the attack and let it happen has even less credibility than the story about 40 beheaded/burned babies yanked from incubators, the ghost of Kiev, Trump pisstapes being sent via DNS packet backchannels to a bank's email server, Sadaam yellowcake, or Bush personally planning 9/11.
It's just speculation on speculation on speculation and imo not even worthy of mentioning without a heavy dose of "yeah this sounds crazy but whatif".
[1]: It's a very interesting meme that people have started referring to him as "Bibi". This seems new to me.
It's easier to spell but has been used in headlines and newspapers for decades. The man has been in and out of power since Clinton after all.
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I’ve seen people refer to him as Bibi for years? I thought it was a common nickname?
It is. I first heard it in the 90s I think.
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I think it's a clout chasing thing. It seemed to start a few years ago as a way for people to imply they know Netanyahu personally (or at least know people who do). Same as referring to Jeff Bezos as "Jeff" or William Shatner as "Bill".
That...can't be it. I think at the least conscious level it's a way to signal that you're someone who keeps up and is well-informed. Just like on February 26, 2022 you could sort normal people from the people who were mainlining /r/worldnews by whether or not they had switched to "Kyiv" yet.
Sudden linguistic shifts like this do annoy me (why do Associated Press style guides get the final say on the English language??) and they do give me big "overnight software update" vibes. Another consequence of the fact that no one reads anything older than one year anymore, so that language is going to start changing faster.
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And what if it is not about holding the power? What if his goal was to deal with hamas once and for all and willing to sacrifice his career for it?
The idea that Netanyahu doesn't prioritize his career above all things is as implausible as the idea that Hamas would establish a just state that accords rights and freedoms to Jews given the chance.
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I am surprised that no one yet opened the most inflammatory aspect of the latest events in Israel. So I am going to do it.
Who if not me, when if not now?
So why it happened? It happened as it happened because, in words of our friends in US Dept of Justice: Israel Has a Successful Gun Control Policy.
Yes, it is from 1992, but things changed little since then. Israel has strict gun laws and they work as intended. Israel has 6,7 guns per 100 inhabitants, very good 108th place in the world. Just 2.1 more than David Hogg heaven land England and Wales, considered to be gun control movement dream and aspiration.
It is easy to understand why we do not hear about Israeli gun laws.
People who do not like guns usually do not like Israel either and would loathe to praise anything coming from there. The same reason why we never heard about Israeli health care or Israeli abortion laws despite that they would make excellent talking point for Blues against Israel loving Reds.
And people who like guns usually like Israel too (while knowing about it only from dank memes that show it as tough nation armed to the teeth).
So, you want to ask, you are blaming the victims? How dare you?
The Israelis were told by their government: "Millions of people who want to kill you live near your homes separated by wire fence. Do not panic and do not prepare to defend yourselves. Your government and your army will protect you, nothing can happen. Fear that they will cross the fence and slaughter you in your own homes is absurd and delusional. Do not be conspiracy theorist, do not be extremist, trust the plan". And, being normal human beings, they trusted because the government was right so far, because nothing happened so far. This is normal human nature, no one to blame.
Now, when something happened, and if nothing changes and Israelis will continue trusting their government as previously, yes I will blame them, and you shall too.
Are there signs that something is changing?
Looks like it.
https://thereload.com/israeli-loosens-gun-carry-rules-after-unprecedented-terror-attack/
What are the tests?
So very generous. And, in addition, citizens will be able to purchase, instead of previous fifty, whole ONE HUNDRED rounds of ammo! Yay!
I’m going to guess that whatever the gun laws were, a (presumably drugged-to-gills) trance festival would have a strict no guns policy.
The festival was one small part of the attack. Technicals stuffed with gunmen were shooting at civilians in urban centers, with many of the videographers within range and great firing positions to respond.
My impression while watching them was almost 100% "Damn, a rifle instead of a phone would be really nice for these guys".
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Bizarre that you think gun control is the most inflammatory issue. Is it a joke? Far and away the most inflammatory issue would be Israel's right to exist and segregate the Arabs and whether that justifies atrocities against Israeli civilians. Literally every discussion online about this, if it goes on long enough, will go back to 1948 or earlier. This is a classic culture war issue.
Yes this was either a parody or this place is becoming a parody of itself.
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I think that for Israeli Jews, trying to make it easier for citizens to own guns would put them between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand, they would be loath to let ethnically Arab citizens of Israel have guns because that would make it much easier for those of them who want to kill Jews to actually do it.
On the other hand, there is no way to write a gun control law that takes ethnicity into account without making it completely obvious that you are running an ethno-state and thus looking really bad to a lot of people in the broader world.
But they are already running an ethno-state. No outsider considers it not to be an ethnic state unless they are making PR mouth noises pretending to the contrary.
,Yes, but bringing it to the arena of gun laws would take it up a notch and look particularly ugly because it basically would look like "we are going to make it legal for any of our random vigilantes and paramilitary groups to easily buy guns while at the same time we will ensure that it is illegal for the Palestinians to defend themselves from such violence".
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Easier than you might think, and Israel is already doing it. To get a gun license in Israel you need to have completed a certain degree of military training (among other requirements). Non-Jews (Druze, Bedouins, some Christian Arabs) who serve in the IDF are not those that you need to worry about starting a riot at the behest of Hamas or Hezbollah.
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Omitted from The Reload is that they are limited to a single firearm that is not a semiauto rifle. So most typically a semiauto pistol like a Glock. And absent the "Short Barreled Rifle" and "Short Barreled Shotgun" NFA restrictions (that existed to close a loophole during drafting when pistols were going to be similarly restricted but when pistols were removed from the bill, the loophole closure was not), has led to the amusing product design space of pistol chassis systems. Americans answer for short carbines working around their laws was the pistol brace, for Israelis the microroni.
The microroni is just a rifle attachment for a handgun. I suppose you're more accurate with it, but the ballistics of it are still shitty compared to a real rifle.
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About a billion plus Indians and a sizeable hundred millions of Pakistanis accept the same deal from their governments without complaint. So do South Koreans, and even their stunted northern cousins. In the former case, there are entire border states where there's a very real risk of Jihadists slipping under the fence and shooting up your village. No demands for guns, just better security from the BSF and Indian Army.
I would be rather concerned if the government was demanding I arm myself to do the job I pay them taxes for, even if I'm a gun nut, and if I ever make it to the US and the decent guns aren't banned, I intend to buy several.
You're observing the very much discussed to death notion that people get along and cheer more for a far-group than they do their far more similar peers who hold much more similar cultural and political views. The Leftists celebrating Palestine don't all want to wear hijabs or ban alcohol, even if a few of them get signal boosted.
There's been a whole lot of complaining. And it's not "a billion plus Indians", it's only the relatively few near the hot borders.
No, there's more than a fence between the South and the North; there's a 4km wide demilitarized zone with minefields and military bases just south of it (and, I presume, north of it)
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Does indians and pakistani hate each other or only their governments? AK 47 doesn't do much good against an army. Against people in toyota trucks they are good enough. A couple of well places snipers could have reduced the festival casualties and probably prevented some of the rapes.
Depends. As you'd expect but for a question covering >1.5 billion people.
I didn't notice any animosity from the Pakistani doctors I befriended in London, barring a few jokes about some poor pilot who got shot down in Pakistani airspace and was mildly roughed up before being exchanged. I suppose the fact that I didn't give a shit made them warm up even faster, I'm no nationalist, at least except when I pine for the US.
You will find hundreds of millions of hardliners, and hundreds of millions more who are indifferent or outright alarmed at the idea of war. If war happens, it's most likely going to be because the US and China kickoff and allies and associates get drawn in. Or an inciting event beyond my power to predict.
I think there's more bellicosity on the Pakistani side, their military relies on fear mongering about India to justify their occasional coups. And the ISI, they need something bigger than Afghanistan to show they're worth more than the damage they deal, which isn't really true itself.
I would hope not even the Palestinians are using something as antiquated as a genuine AK-47, or at least the modernized (so early it's hardly modern) AKM. But I get your point.
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If they had looser gun control laws, I’d expect just as often those looser guns end up in the hands of terrorists as in the hands of people using them for self-defense.
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The gun control policy works well for Israel. They have low crime. They have low suicides.
They do have a very significant problem with Palestinian terrorists, but it's obvious that simply ending gun control would not be a sufficient response to that problem - large scale military action is required. So there is no problem that could actually get solved by a change in gun policy, and several significant problems that could easily be created by it.
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Their military was apparently caught with their pants down, why would you expect civilians to do better instead of just becoming tasty weapon lootboxes?
Seems it worked for a few communities.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defenders-of-kibbutz-nir-am-say-they-killed-2-terrorists-saturday-preventing-takeover/
The military was mostly absent and then playing catchup. Civilians were not absent.
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Because if you own a gun you're already in your house...with the gun. So when you hear your neighbors getting executed, you take out your gun and stop the person doing the executing.
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This should be an incredibly interesting discussion for anybody following this topic: https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1712170815637061914
This is Lex Fridman interviewing Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner is interesting on his own, and as an advisor to President Trump, but what makes him really interesting given the topic at hand today is the role that he had in negotiating The Abraham Accords: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Accords?useskin=vector
The Trump administration had normalization between Israel and Palestine as one of its primary policy goals, and they actually (via the Abraham Accords) made real progress towards it. It's a tragedy that they weren't able to keep working on this. I strongly suspect that this, (as well as [not to get too far off topic here], Biden's multiple absolute foreign policy embarrassments) will be a major issue in the coming 2024 elections. I think that the reality is that the world really was a much safer, much more peaceful, much more prosperous place under the Trump administration (although not domestically, given the Floyd riots). The guy being interviewed here, like him or not, seems to have had a role in making that happen.
And as a complete aside: my absolute dream podcast guest on Lex Fridman would be Steve Bannon. I strongly suspect that Trump is largely a creation of Bannon, and hearing a long form interview with him would be absolutely fascinating. If you need an introduction to Bannon, here's a talk, as well as substantial Q&A that he did at the Oxford Student Union 4 years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8AtOw-xyMo8
Anyway, this is all related. Kushner definitely has some interesting things to say about the current crisis.
edit: not to sneer, but god damn this is depressing: https://old.reddit.com/r/lexfridman/comments/175kl5e/jared_kushner_israel_palestine_hamas_gaza_iran/
This is the /r/lexfridman discussion about this podcast. Nearly every one of these top comments are some version of "what the hell does Jared Kushner have to say about anything?" - Lex Fridman's audience I suspect thinks of themselves as above average intelligence and doesn't even have basic knowledge of this topic they're all talking so confidently about. Insane.
The most upvoted questions seem to be something like, "why didn't Lex ask about the 2 billion.", which is funny because he does ask about it. Jared seemed reasonably thoughtful. Over the course of Trump's presidency we saw Jared's reputation change from wonder-kid to village idiot. I don't know if he is a wonder kid, but he certainly isn't the village idiot.
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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:
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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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 :
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.
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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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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.
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Power and prestige for the Jihadis and their friends, rather than Hamas officials.
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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.
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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.
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Israeli Invasion Plans Target Gaza City and Hamas Leadership
From the New York Times’ report on the coming invasion (emphasis mine):
Hard not to see this turning into an unimaginable bloodbath. Tens of thousands of fighters? That tunnel guy’s YouTube video suggested they’d be extremely difficult to root out. I suppose all the hostages are living on borrowed time, if still alive. It promises to be a harsh look at the reality of modern urban warfare against a highly entrenched foe.
Are they really going to try a Fallujah? I wouldn't want to be a grunt on either side. This is going to be hell.
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I'd still like to think Bibi is smarter than this, and that this is just bluffing. I recall him saying, years ago, that a key part of his strategy against Iran was them thinking "there's a crazy guy in Jerusalem willing to do anything".
Judge people by their actions. So far, Israel's tactic has been to starve, bomb and wear out the civilian population of Gaza. The endgame is clearly a massive ethnic cleansing. There are also rumors the US has offered Egypt monetary benefits to host at least a million Gazans in a "tent city". If I were Bibi, I'd act just like he has thus far. It's the smart, cost-effective strategy. Clearly, the status quo cannot continue and Israel is trying its level best to get rid of the Gaza civilian population. But doing so, even with the backing of the US, is harder than you might think given 24/7 media.
One last thing. One theme I've harped on is Bibi rhetorically boxing himself in. He has now set expectations very high that he may simply be forced to do things he knows are foolish because it would end his political career otherwise. I understand this sounds extraordinarily callous that a man in his position would be willing to sacrifice many lives to save his political skin, but I am no longer discounting any possibility.
Bad as his position is now, his position if 5,000 or 10,000 or more young Israeli men die in the invasion of Gaza will be much, much worse.
Hand to heart, what do you think his odds of remaining in the upper echelons of Israeli politics are? He has failed catastrophically, but if he executes the «flawed but reliable tough-minded leader carrying us through the uncertain times of crisis» move well… I am not sure it'll work. But also, that's much of his expertise and genius.
He needs the core security minded Likud voter, still.
If he can successfully win in Gaza with minimal loss of Israeli life, he might be OK. But that seems unlikely if he commits to an invasion.
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Doesn't Bibi have that Berlusconi quality where you can get rubbished a dozen times but still bounce reliably back in time? Then again he's 73, but Berlusconi managed to hang on to some power almost to the end, too.
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How much ordinance would it take to turn the entire Gaza strip into Verdun? I doubt that Israel has enough in its stockpile (unless we're counting the nukes), but it could theoretically be done.
My guess is that Israel will advance to the sea along a narrow front through the middle of the strip, cutting the insurgents fortified in Gaza City off from supplies and humanitarian aid being brought in from the South. How many weeks worth of provisions do you think Hamas has stocked up underground?
I did the math before out of curiosity to see how many 155mm shells it would take to cover all of the Gaza strip with the lethal radius of at least one shell's explosion. It came out to around 52 million shells. If all 250 of Israel's m109 howitzers fired at their sustained rate of fire of one round per minute (and assuming no need for maintenance etc) it would take them around 144 days. I was looking at this just to get some idea of the scales involved in all this.
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Judging by satellite imagery, there's enough farmland south of Gaza that the front doesn't have to be that narrow. There are towns like Al-Mughraqa in the way, but they are similar enough to Donbass suburbs that IDF could hire some Wagner instructors or even point teams.
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I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of tunnel-gassing or some other tactic used to kill the people in them before going in. International treaties be damned. Screw going down into those things.
Israel probably doesn’t have the capacity to clear tunnels by chemical warfare, and won’t in time to help the invasion.
The reason is simple- quantity. Successful chemical warfare requires tons and tons and tons of the stuff, even in a confined space. Israel almost certainly doesn’t have that much, we’d know if they did because it’s sufficiently capital-intensive that you can’t hide it. And while it has a relatively short time frame to produce(after all, civilian chemical plants produce similar chemicals all the time), we’re still talking about months and months. And Israel wants to go in soon.
but israel/IDF had known for years if not decades about these tunnels. You are saying they have prepared for this sort of thing at all, even as an contingent solution?
Their entire policy was based on not doing what they’re about to try to do.
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Several times during WWII, the US Army was faced with similar situations involving well-fortified Japanese emplacements. In some of these instances, like Fort Drum in Manila, combat engineers pumped in thousands of gallons of mixed diesel fuel and gasoline, followed by a timed incendiary charge. I think the more modern solution typically involves thermobaric weapons. I'm not aware of any treaty since that would prohibit either, but both seem like painful ways to go out.
Yep, if you light the chemicals on fire, it's perfect legal and it works even better. Not too many airtight doors will withstand a fuel-air explosion in the next compartment.
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Yes, I would think something like this is better. If you use any type of poison gas, after you deploy it, you will eventually have to clean it out, make it safe, and check out what's in there. A major pain in the ass and high risk of friendly casualties if you don't do it perfectly. If you use flammables or explosives, then you know it's safe after the stuff goes boom and it has a little time to cool down.
Goes along with the argument I read somewhere else - poison gas isn't used anymore because it isn't a very good weapon, not because its effects are so horrible or it's banned by treaty. It was probably possible to ban by treaty because it's not a very good weapon more than being horrible.
A good rule of thumb is that if US signs some treaty about avoiding given type of weapons, it means it’s ineffective, but if it doesn’t, it is useful and practical. Compare, for example, chemical weapons, which US agreed to not use, with land mines or cluster munitions, which very much are a part of US arsenal, despite existence of treaties banning these: US is just not a signatory to these.
Even more cynically, the treaties that US is not a signatory to, simply are not worth much in the first place: the signatories to these simply don’t expect to fight a serious war that would require using these, so commitment to not use them is not worth much, because they will likely disregard their obligations soon as they do find themselves in one. See, for example, Ukraine, which happily uses these, despite being a signatory to Ottawa treaty.
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Yeah, this is looking like Mariupol 2: No Electricity Boogaloo.
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Is it possible that Israel have developed a smart even if cruel way to deal with tunnels with minimal costs to Israeli life?
Is it possible to gather data from the shelling to map them?
If they don't it will be bloodbath for Israel.
We shall see soon enough.
Apparently even chemical weapons / gas is unviable because the tunnels have airtight doors.
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