naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed 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.
In a weird way this really is about communism vs capitalism, radical vs liberal, left vs center.
My understanding is the recent ancestors of the present Israelis bought the land from willing sellers fair and square, whose tenants were evicted when the new buyers wanted to move in. From a liberal standpoint, we see one new consensual transaction being conducted and one formerly consensual transaction being canceled when no longer consensual. Completely legit and just.
That this happened to result in a large enough number of people in a short enough time getting evicted and not knowing what to do with themselves and becoming ghettoized in shantytowns (prior to the initial civil wars in that region), is exactly the sort of thing that leftists say is wrong with liberalism.
The fundamental leftist argument is that purely voluntary transactions can force some people into conditions sufficiently intolerable that it constitutes a real injustice, even if all contracts are upheld and everything is consensual.
So you have on one hand: "we purchased the land in Mandatory Palestine fair and square, we toiled and saved and spent hard earned money on it, and moved in, and now people want to kill us"
And on the other hand: "100 years ago we were spread out over this whole land, we had a system going, we had our own society. Now we are impoverished, crammed into this little ghetto while you rub your possession of our land in our face."
In the first case: voluntary, uncoerced transactions between consenting parties, aka liberalism
In the second case: those purely voluntary transactions result in injustice, aka leftism
That's why the left is pro-Palestinian. Pointing out how Muslims are anti-LGBTQ or whatever falls on deaf ears because it's not really about that with them.
Far easier to understand it as the way it slots into power dynamics and progressive stack thinking. Jews have strong ingroup ethnic preference, traditions, and cluster together in money management, media and entertainment fields in the strongest country in the world, and exert outsized influence in its politics because America is the country where money talks louder than anything else and allows capital to do insane, outsized things.
Muslim states across the ME are, to be blunt, shitholes dominated by tribal winner-takes-all politics or foreign power influence, usually some combination of both. The average westerner only sees them in the context of the Cold War (plucky rebels fighting communism), the War on Terror (9/11 perpetrators), or Predator drone victims (we fear the blue sky).
If you go back a few decades, or even as recently as Dubya, you can see the dominating force of Christian religion and puritanism in American politics. American red tribe has traditionally used this leverage to back Israel, because Israel and the promised land features heavily in Christian theology and they were an ally in the Middle East back when oil interests there were considered much more critical to America maintaining global hegemon status. Plus, Israel is much less likely than its neighbors to maintain a percent of extremists that will pitch Christians off rooftops.
Of course, as America secularized, an ascendant Blue tribe would calcify against this, because both tribes in America define themselves by what the other tribe is not. Israel support is Red-coded, along with Bible-thumping, Dubya-supporting, bomb-the-brown-people, military-industrial-complex enriching itself by selling Israel weapons they use to oppress the brown people. So blue tribe looks at this and starts bible-bashing, Dubya-is-a-moron bitching, campaigning against America's foreign dalliances (imagine that not being red-coded before Obama-Trump) and whining about the MIC war profiteering. [Unsolicited Opinions On Israel] showed up in a Marvel comic book as a boo-outgroup signal.
No guess which side would equate Israel's existence to modern colonialism.
I'm pretty sure you could get the left to be pro-Israel as soon as you got Red America to be pro-Muslim. I'm not quite sure how that could happen, but stranger has happened before in American politics.
In a weird way this really is about communism vs capitalism, radical vs liberal, left vs center.
My understanding is the recent ancestors of the present Israelis bought the land from willing sellers fair and square
Contemporary Palestinian land ownership and sales were much closer to feudalism than capitalism (and early Israel much closer to socialism, fwiw). The landlords who were selling Palestinian land, often living in places as far flung as Beirut or Damascus, had themselves only the feeblest of legitimate claims to the property, having only recently acquired it through a crappy Land Reform bill that disenfranchised the peasantry.
The registration process itself was open to manipulation. Land collectively owned by village residents was registered in the name of a single landowner, with merchants and local Ottoman administrators registering large stretches of land in their own name. The result was land that became the legal property of people who may have never lived there, while locals, even those who had lived on the land for generations, became tenants of absentee owners.
The Palestinian peasantry themselves never recognized those claims and in many cases were entirely unaware of who exactly had even claimed their land:
The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 "brought about the appropriation by the influential and rich families of Beirut, Damascus, and to a lesser extent Jerusalem and Jaffa and other sub-district capitals, of vast tracts of land in Syria and Palestine and their registration in the name of these families in the land registers"....
In the 1930s, most of the land was bought from landowners. Of the land that the Jews bought, 52.6% were bought from non-Palestinian landowners, 24.6% from Palestinian landowners, 13.4% from government, churches, and foreign companies, and only 9.4% from fellaheen (farmers).
Of course, direct sales were but a small part of the Palestinian land that was ultimately acquired by Israel anyway.
Both of those narratives you presented are both wrong historically and non-existent in popular conception.
While it’s true that “Jewish land” pre 1948 was mostly fairly purchased, it’s a small part of what eventually became the state of Israel. Those borders were decided by war, but the initial purchases did set the starting point for the war.
Conversely, Palestinians aren’t Bedouin. They weren’t so much spread out etc., as much as they just lived in other places than they currently do. A lot of their assets were taken from them by Israel after the war, including private property. Keep in mind that there wasn’t a Palestinian state if some kind, it’s more of a personal grievance on a national scale.
The LGBT-thing doesnt make the least bit of sense to me. I am probably to the left of the majority of the people here on gay and trans right, but I never use that as a measuring stick for who is morally in the right in a given geopolitical situation. Nor have I ever met another person IRL who does the same. For example, I have no idea who is more socially liberal of Armenia or Azerbaijan, but I dont need to know that to decide that the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh was wrong.
I feel like this is the right-wing version of tankies who cant understand why anyone who is liberal would support Ukraine when they obviously have a massive problem with far-right elements in their country. Ukraine can love and revere Stephen Bandera and the Azov Batallion, while still being in the right in resisting the Russian invasion, and this is no different.
I don’t think you have to a be a leftist to oppose a different people consciously forming an ethnic enclave on your current territory, regardless of the means. Would you really accept that if done to you? It seems like the sort of thing that might not turn out well.
To my knowledge, the right wing support for this in Europe derived mostly from a desire to be rid of the Jews.
The area was never ethnically Turkish, so no? Like when the new German Empire attempted to Germanize Posen/Poznań, the local ethnicity organized to prevent it even though the Germans owned it? As any sane ethnicity would, since their overlords wanted to cement their dominance by changing the ethnic character of the territory? People tend to resist deliberate attempts to displace them by other ethnicities, regardless of who the overlord happens to be. (Incidentally, the parties & politicians that came to prominence fighting the Poznań debacle were apparently much more virulent in their nationalism than those from other regions, which had unfortunate knock-on effects after independence. Almost like people are radicalized by people trying to replace them (to be clear, Hamas are ISIS-tier murderer-zealots, and I’m not too fond of Dmowski or Endecja either).
To the extent they do, I think they should knock it off. Creating new ethnic enclaves has tended to be bad news since the rise of nationalism & nationalism-adjacent ideologies.
A thorny and ambiguous political question in many, many cases, but not particularly so in this one. None of the three parties (overlords, inhabitants, incomers) considered themselves to share ethnicities with one another. I don’t believe that either Turks or Jews would fail to notice or act if the same sort of thing were done to them. Even if the incomers are initially peaceful and they’re no worse (or even better) than the natives in tit-for-tat violence, this tends not to turn out well for recipient people.
I think the Turkification of Anatolia was bad, and would have a favorable opinion of the First Crusade if it had aimed at restoring Anatolian territory to the Byzantines instead of conquering a difficult-to-defend coastal strip of primarily symbolic significance.
We are assuming that an ethnicity is a grouping of people along some criteria that can legitimately claim land as a group. That has moral authority to resist being moved from that land, that has the right as a group to prevent other groups from coming in, violently if necessary. Yes? I share this assumption, but I think we might differ on the criteria.
The middle east is ridden with groups of various genetic descents, political traditions and religious faiths. Mostly everyone's pretty mixed up on all three axes. So who exactly are the "ethnicities" that have a right to claim land, kick others off it and form political nations? Should the Lebanese Shia have their own country? The bedouin or Kurds? The Druze, the Sufis, the Maronites, the Egyptian Copts? Do they all have the moral right to start murdering civilians if they don't get their own state? Where do we draw the line? Texas?
I say for the purposes of the laws of war, we set it at the nation-state. Where do you think it should be set?
The phenomenon of foreign groups arriving and displacing natives long predates the appearance of nation states, and I don’t think the impulse to resist it does or should depend on having one. The details will depend on the technology levels of the parties and also their mode of subsistence (so that if the natives are pastoralists or mixed hunter-agriculturalists, the issue won’t be land rights in the same sense as with pure agriculturalists).
Conflicts over who constitutes an ethnicity for the purpose of forming a state can often be extremely murky, e.g., with Southern Slavs. I don’t necessarily have an opinion on exactly how Serbo-Croatian types should be split up any more than Levantines. But if members of some Illyrian ethnoreligious diaspora that had left the area more than a thousand years earlier started showing up in Montenegro or Bosnia to buy up land to form an ethnic enclave, I expect they’d get a chilly reception.
I don’t think the people now called Palestinians played their cards very well, and I condemn killing of civilians when the parties are operating within a system where the distinction is meaningful (I do include this whole conflict, including during the Ottoman period - contrasting with, e.g., native warfare in what’s now the Eastern U.S., where no such distinction was generally established or observed). My original point was there’s nothing left or right wing about opposing a self-consciously distinct ethnic group from acquiring your home from under your feet, whether with or without violence, whether legal or illegal by the prevailing standards of the time and place. People will tend to oppose this happening (to themselves, at any rate) regardless of the flavor of their own ideology - a right wing ideology will serve as well for this as a left wing one.
My understanding is the recent ancestors of the present Israelis bought the land from willing sellers fair and square, whose tenants were evicted when the new buyers wanted to move in
I don't even think it's that dynamic that leads the American left to be so sympathetic towards Palestinians. Instead, I think it's the old Arnold Kling Three Languages of Politics thesis that includes progressives thinking primarily in terms of the oppressed-oppressor axis and conservatives thinking in terms of the civilization-barbarism axis. You can see echos of this all over the language that people use to talk about it, with the emphasis on how utterly savage the Hamas attacks are and how Israel has backed Palestinians into a corner. Who conservatives and progressives sympathize with can almost always be neatly predicted by applying that framework; even when it looks to me like the progressives are siding with power, they still usually believe themselves to be siding with the oppressed.
This actually feels pretty close to my thinking on it. Every time I start to think along the lines of, those Palestinians did get a pretty raw deal, getting booted off of their land effectively permanently mostly due to things that had nothing to do with them, they go and do something so freaking savage that it's hard to think anything but that the only thing they deserve is the same savagery pointed right back at them.
The left / blue team tries to excuse it with "that's how the oppressed naturally behave", to which I would reply that plenty of groups have managed to rebel against oppression without resorting to the laundry list of awful things the Palestinians have been known for.
those Palestinians did get a pretty raw deal, getting booted off of their land effectively permanently mostly due to things that had nothing to do with them
I agree with that. Then, of course - like an awful lot of oppressed people whose way of relating to each other is the paradigm of oppressor and oppressed - they turned around and engaged in savagery. Like, I feel for the Palestinians, but the guys who decided to open a war by attacking a music festival and then parading the corpses around seem to have erred badly. Even leaving morality aside, this looks like it might just be a ploy to goad Israel and perhaps the West into an equally savage response. What is the ultimate purpose of this kind of thing for Hamas? Who benefits? What does "victory" look like? Even if we're being uncharitable and it's "Drive the Israelis out of Israel, kill those that won't leave, and control the territory there", deliberately attacking civilians hardens resolve and makes you look like a bunch of savages to Westerners...the ones with the boatloads of guns and ammo and bombs.
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Notes -
In a weird way this really is about communism vs capitalism, radical vs liberal, left vs center.
My understanding is the recent ancestors of the present Israelis bought the land from willing sellers fair and square, whose tenants were evicted when the new buyers wanted to move in. From a liberal standpoint, we see one new consensual transaction being conducted and one formerly consensual transaction being canceled when no longer consensual. Completely legit and just.
That this happened to result in a large enough number of people in a short enough time getting evicted and not knowing what to do with themselves and becoming ghettoized in shantytowns (prior to the initial civil wars in that region), is exactly the sort of thing that leftists say is wrong with liberalism.
The fundamental leftist argument is that purely voluntary transactions can force some people into conditions sufficiently intolerable that it constitutes a real injustice, even if all contracts are upheld and everything is consensual.
So you have on one hand: "we purchased the land in Mandatory Palestine fair and square, we toiled and saved and spent hard earned money on it, and moved in, and now people want to kill us"
And on the other hand: "100 years ago we were spread out over this whole land, we had a system going, we had our own society. Now we are impoverished, crammed into this little ghetto while you rub your possession of our land in our face."
In the first case: voluntary, uncoerced transactions between consenting parties, aka liberalism
In the second case: those purely voluntary transactions result in injustice, aka leftism
That's why the left is pro-Palestinian. Pointing out how Muslims are anti-LGBTQ or whatever falls on deaf ears because it's not really about that with them.
Overthinking it.
Far easier to understand it as the way it slots into power dynamics and progressive stack thinking. Jews have strong ingroup ethnic preference, traditions, and cluster together in money management, media and entertainment fields in the strongest country in the world, and exert outsized influence in its politics because America is the country where money talks louder than anything else and allows capital to do insane, outsized things.
Muslim states across the ME are, to be blunt, shitholes dominated by tribal winner-takes-all politics or foreign power influence, usually some combination of both. The average westerner only sees them in the context of the Cold War (plucky rebels fighting communism), the War on Terror (9/11 perpetrators), or Predator drone victims (we fear the blue sky).
If you go back a few decades, or even as recently as Dubya, you can see the dominating force of Christian religion and puritanism in American politics. American red tribe has traditionally used this leverage to back Israel, because Israel and the promised land features heavily in Christian theology and they were an ally in the Middle East back when oil interests there were considered much more critical to America maintaining global hegemon status. Plus, Israel is much less likely than its neighbors to maintain a percent of extremists that will pitch Christians off rooftops.
Of course, as America secularized, an ascendant Blue tribe would calcify against this, because both tribes in America define themselves by what the other tribe is not. Israel support is Red-coded, along with Bible-thumping, Dubya-supporting, bomb-the-brown-people, military-industrial-complex enriching itself by selling Israel weapons they use to oppress the brown people. So blue tribe looks at this and starts bible-bashing, Dubya-is-a-moron bitching, campaigning against America's foreign dalliances (imagine that not being red-coded before Obama-Trump) and whining about the MIC war profiteering. [Unsolicited Opinions On Israel] showed up in a Marvel comic book as a boo-outgroup signal.
No guess which side would equate Israel's existence to modern colonialism.
I'm pretty sure you could get the left to be pro-Israel as soon as you got Red America to be pro-Muslim. I'm not quite sure how that could happen, but stranger has happened before in American politics.
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Contemporary Palestinian land ownership and sales were much closer to feudalism than capitalism (and early Israel much closer to socialism, fwiw). The landlords who were selling Palestinian land, often living in places as far flung as Beirut or Damascus, had themselves only the feeblest of legitimate claims to the property, having only recently acquired it through a crappy Land Reform bill that disenfranchised the peasantry.
The Palestinian peasantry themselves never recognized those claims and in many cases were entirely unaware of who exactly had even claimed their land:
Of course, direct sales were but a small part of the Palestinian land that was ultimately acquired by Israel anyway.
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Both of those narratives you presented are both wrong historically and non-existent in popular conception.
While it’s true that “Jewish land” pre 1948 was mostly fairly purchased, it’s a small part of what eventually became the state of Israel. Those borders were decided by war, but the initial purchases did set the starting point for the war.
Conversely, Palestinians aren’t Bedouin. They weren’t so much spread out etc., as much as they just lived in other places than they currently do. A lot of their assets were taken from them by Israel after the war, including private property. Keep in mind that there wasn’t a Palestinian state if some kind, it’s more of a personal grievance on a national scale.
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The LGBT-thing doesnt make the least bit of sense to me. I am probably to the left of the majority of the people here on gay and trans right, but I never use that as a measuring stick for who is morally in the right in a given geopolitical situation. Nor have I ever met another person IRL who does the same. For example, I have no idea who is more socially liberal of Armenia or Azerbaijan, but I dont need to know that to decide that the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh was wrong.
I feel like this is the right-wing version of tankies who cant understand why anyone who is liberal would support Ukraine when they obviously have a massive problem with far-right elements in their country. Ukraine can love and revere Stephen Bandera and the Azov Batallion, while still being in the right in resisting the Russian invasion, and this is no different.
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I don’t think you have to a be a leftist to oppose a different people consciously forming an ethnic enclave on your current territory, regardless of the means. Would you really accept that if done to you? It seems like the sort of thing that might not turn out well.
To my knowledge, the right wing support for this in Europe derived mostly from a desire to be rid of the Jews.
Whose current territory? The Ottomans? They were apparently cool with it.
And the left very much supports forming ethnic enclaves within other countries, so long as they are western and (mostly) white.
The area was never ethnically Turkish, so no? Like when the new German Empire attempted to Germanize Posen/Poznań, the local ethnicity organized to prevent it even though the Germans owned it? As any sane ethnicity would, since their overlords wanted to cement their dominance by changing the ethnic character of the territory? People tend to resist deliberate attempts to displace them by other ethnicities, regardless of who the overlord happens to be. (Incidentally, the parties & politicians that came to prominence fighting the Poznań debacle were apparently much more virulent in their nationalism than those from other regions, which had unfortunate knock-on effects after independence. Almost like people are radicalized by people trying to replace them (to be clear, Hamas are ISIS-tier murderer-zealots, and I’m not too fond of Dmowski or Endecja either).
To the extent they do, I think they should knock it off. Creating new ethnic enclaves has tended to be bad news since the rise of nationalism & nationalism-adjacent ideologies.
What counts as an ethnicity deserving of a homeland with a claim on territory and the right to exclude people of other ethnicities?
Turkey wasn't always Turkish.
A thorny and ambiguous political question in many, many cases, but not particularly so in this one. None of the three parties (overlords, inhabitants, incomers) considered themselves to share ethnicities with one another. I don’t believe that either Turks or Jews would fail to notice or act if the same sort of thing were done to them. Even if the incomers are initially peaceful and they’re no worse (or even better) than the natives in tit-for-tat violence, this tends not to turn out well for recipient people.
I think the Turkification of Anatolia was bad, and would have a favorable opinion of the First Crusade if it had aimed at restoring Anatolian territory to the Byzantines instead of conquering a difficult-to-defend coastal strip of primarily symbolic significance.
I think you miss the point?
We are assuming that an ethnicity is a grouping of people along some criteria that can legitimately claim land as a group. That has moral authority to resist being moved from that land, that has the right as a group to prevent other groups from coming in, violently if necessary. Yes? I share this assumption, but I think we might differ on the criteria.
The middle east is ridden with groups of various genetic descents, political traditions and religious faiths. Mostly everyone's pretty mixed up on all three axes. So who exactly are the "ethnicities" that have a right to claim land, kick others off it and form political nations? Should the Lebanese Shia have their own country? The bedouin or Kurds? The Druze, the Sufis, the Maronites, the Egyptian Copts? Do they all have the moral right to start murdering civilians if they don't get their own state? Where do we draw the line? Texas?
I say for the purposes of the laws of war, we set it at the nation-state. Where do you think it should be set?
The phenomenon of foreign groups arriving and displacing natives long predates the appearance of nation states, and I don’t think the impulse to resist it does or should depend on having one. The details will depend on the technology levels of the parties and also their mode of subsistence (so that if the natives are pastoralists or mixed hunter-agriculturalists, the issue won’t be land rights in the same sense as with pure agriculturalists).
Conflicts over who constitutes an ethnicity for the purpose of forming a state can often be extremely murky, e.g., with Southern Slavs. I don’t necessarily have an opinion on exactly how Serbo-Croatian types should be split up any more than Levantines. But if members of some Illyrian ethnoreligious diaspora that had left the area more than a thousand years earlier started showing up in Montenegro or Bosnia to buy up land to form an ethnic enclave, I expect they’d get a chilly reception.
I don’t think the people now called Palestinians played their cards very well, and I condemn killing of civilians when the parties are operating within a system where the distinction is meaningful (I do include this whole conflict, including during the Ottoman period - contrasting with, e.g., native warfare in what’s now the Eastern U.S., where no such distinction was generally established or observed). My original point was there’s nothing left or right wing about opposing a self-consciously distinct ethnic group from acquiring your home from under your feet, whether with or without violence, whether legal or illegal by the prevailing standards of the time and place. People will tend to oppose this happening (to themselves, at any rate) regardless of the flavor of their own ideology - a right wing ideology will serve as well for this as a left wing one.
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Not all of it. Just some of it.
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That seems a bit over-simplified, to say the least.
The left has generally been pro-"national liberation" for decades, so there is no need for some sort of special explanation re Palestinians.
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I don't even think it's that dynamic that leads the American left to be so sympathetic towards Palestinians. Instead, I think it's the old Arnold Kling Three Languages of Politics thesis that includes progressives thinking primarily in terms of the oppressed-oppressor axis and conservatives thinking in terms of the civilization-barbarism axis. You can see echos of this all over the language that people use to talk about it, with the emphasis on how utterly savage the Hamas attacks are and how Israel has backed Palestinians into a corner. Who conservatives and progressives sympathize with can almost always be neatly predicted by applying that framework; even when it looks to me like the progressives are siding with power, they still usually believe themselves to be siding with the oppressed.
This actually feels pretty close to my thinking on it. Every time I start to think along the lines of, those Palestinians did get a pretty raw deal, getting booted off of their land effectively permanently mostly due to things that had nothing to do with them, they go and do something so freaking savage that it's hard to think anything but that the only thing they deserve is the same savagery pointed right back at them.
The left / blue team tries to excuse it with "that's how the oppressed naturally behave", to which I would reply that plenty of groups have managed to rebel against oppression without resorting to the laundry list of awful things the Palestinians have been known for.
I agree with that. Then, of course - like an awful lot of oppressed people whose way of relating to each other is the paradigm of oppressor and oppressed - they turned around and engaged in savagery. Like, I feel for the Palestinians, but the guys who decided to open a war by attacking a music festival and then parading the corpses around seem to have erred badly. Even leaving morality aside, this looks like it might just be a ploy to goad Israel and perhaps the West into an equally savage response. What is the ultimate purpose of this kind of thing for Hamas? Who benefits? What does "victory" look like? Even if we're being uncharitable and it's "Drive the Israelis out of Israel, kill those that won't leave, and control the territory there", deliberately attacking civilians hardens resolve and makes you look like a bunch of savages to Westerners...the ones with the boatloads of guns and ammo and bombs.
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