naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
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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.
Another question, possibly illuminating, is why is the US so closely aligned with Jordan? We prop them up even more, if I'm not mistaken.
My guess would be that we have to separate our view of our strategic relationship with Israel today from our strategic relationship in the 60's and 70's when we were more reliant on the oil it's access and defense and that is the relationship that defines where we are today. Likely, once all the Boomers are out of government and it's run by Millenials and Zoomers, we'll care about a different set of global priorities. I almost choked to death on my coffee trying to imagine that world, but it's inevitable.
Jordan is one of the few sane and livable places left.
If there is eventually Kurdistan it may also become one (i really wish it to the kurds, but chances are between 0 and me getting married to Sofia Vergara lookalike)
There's two allies to the West in the Middle East: Israel and the various monarchs, emirs etc., as a group. Jordan belongs to the latter category.
What do these have in common? They stand as a fundamental stopgap to something that would really threaten Western interests: Arab unification, first advocated by secular Arab nationalists like Nasser and then by Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. Israel, by its sheer existence, means that you can't unite North Africa (or at least Egypt) with the Middle East, and the petty monarchs are not about to accept a solution where they are no longer a monarch.
"Israel, both implicitly and explicitly, works as one part of a project to stop the formation of an united Arab/Muslim state, which would be able to exert huge influence through its control of oil" is a considerably better explanation for why the West keeps sticking up with Israel instead of Arabs (apart from the monarchs and whatever other allies the West can scrounge up) than Zionists just hypnotizing the West to do something completely irrational with no benefit to itself. Sure, the Zionist movements in the West (Jewish and Christian) play a role, but there are also actual geopolitical reasons.
When has Arab unification ever been a serious threat, rather than just something fringe theorists and diasporoids jerk off about? Nasser's great union of Egypt and Syria lasted a whopping three years before the Syrians wanted the Egyptians to leave. That great Ba'athist, Saddam, was kept afloat during his war with Iran by Kuwait, and then decided to repay the favor by invading and plundering Kuwait. Arguably Arab nationalists and pan-Arabists have done more damage to the cause of Arab unification than anyone else.
If you mean the existence of Israel stopped Nasser from being able to march troops into Syria to crush dissent, then sure, but the actual reason the UAR collapsed was because Syrians felt the Egyptians had turned their country into a colony under Egypt's control and not into an equal partner. The existence of Israel is a logistical hurdle to the formation of a united Arab/Muslim state, but the real obstacle to such a state is that nobody wants it, and those who experienced it for the briefest moment discovered that they hated it.
Gaddafi tried to create a unified state with Tunisia as well, on the same theory of Islamic unity. It fell through because Algeria's secular, Arab nationalist government threatened to invade Tunisia if the union materialized. Israel had even less to do with that failure.
Jordan and Israel represent the two sides of the Middle Eastern coin as envisioned by the British orientalists of the early 20th century, whose role America eventually partially took over.
On one side were the Jews, mostly shtetl dwellers and assorted Levantine merchants, led by what was hoped to be a more civilized caste of Western European types, raised and educated in England and to a lesser extent France, who were first-rate supporters, much like the Scots, of Empire. Cecil Rhodes himself was, after all, an agent of the Rothschild family, and every early piece of lobbying by wealthy Anglo-French Jews for Israel was predicated on it being an outpost of Europe in the Orient.
The flipside of the coin was that many British and French aristos were themselves inheritors of a long tradition of orientalism, involving variously dashing Arab swordsmen, ancient desert customs, camels, the honor and nobility of a tribal culture, fanatic devotion to victory and God and so on. As the 19th century and early 20th centuries dragged on, the British were increasingly successful at having the heirs to various Middle Eastern monarchies sent to Eton and Sandhurst (quite a number still are). Jordan to some extent represents the epitome of this, the King is literally half British and descended from the colonial officer class on his mother’s side.
As the Middle East fell apart after Suez and the Americans realized the gravity of their mistake in not more vigorously opposing Nasser (which triggered a series of events that ultimately convinced the inhabitants of the region that they were once again in control of their destinies), the US tried, for various reasons, to shore up what was left.
On both sides of the coin though, the idea was that the respective ‘non-western’ aspects of the relevant cultures could be managed appropriately by Britain and eventually the US as successor state, and that it was best to keep the ‘good sort’ of person in charge, the kind who knew the etiquette at the right kind of Pall Mall club, or maybe at a DC charity gala. History may have disabused us of this notion, but it was a long time in the making.
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Notes -
Another question, possibly illuminating, is why is the US so closely aligned with Jordan? We prop them up even more, if I'm not mistaken. My guess would be that we have to separate our view of our strategic relationship with Israel today from our strategic relationship in the 60's and 70's when we were more reliant on the oil it's access and defense and that is the relationship that defines where we are today. Likely, once all the Boomers are out of government and it's run by Millenials and Zoomers, we'll care about a different set of global priorities. I almost choked to death on my coffee trying to imagine that world, but it's inevitable.
Jordan is one of the few sane and livable places left.
If there is eventually Kurdistan it may also become one (i really wish it to the kurds, but chances are between 0 and me getting married to Sofia Vergara lookalike)
She's getting a divorce so you might not have to settle for a lookalike.
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There's two allies to the West in the Middle East: Israel and the various monarchs, emirs etc., as a group. Jordan belongs to the latter category.
What do these have in common? They stand as a fundamental stopgap to something that would really threaten Western interests: Arab unification, first advocated by secular Arab nationalists like Nasser and then by Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. Israel, by its sheer existence, means that you can't unite North Africa (or at least Egypt) with the Middle East, and the petty monarchs are not about to accept a solution where they are no longer a monarch.
"Israel, both implicitly and explicitly, works as one part of a project to stop the formation of an united Arab/Muslim state, which would be able to exert huge influence through its control of oil" is a considerably better explanation for why the West keeps sticking up with Israel instead of Arabs (apart from the monarchs and whatever other allies the West can scrounge up) than Zionists just hypnotizing the West to do something completely irrational with no benefit to itself. Sure, the Zionist movements in the West (Jewish and Christian) play a role, but there are also actual geopolitical reasons.
When has Arab unification ever been a serious threat, rather than just something fringe theorists and diasporoids jerk off about? Nasser's great union of Egypt and Syria lasted a whopping three years before the Syrians wanted the Egyptians to leave. That great Ba'athist, Saddam, was kept afloat during his war with Iran by Kuwait, and then decided to repay the favor by invading and plundering Kuwait. Arguably Arab nationalists and pan-Arabists have done more damage to the cause of Arab unification than anyone else.
The Syrian rebels were able to break up UAR with ease precisely because there was a whole-ass country between Egypt and Syria.
If you mean the existence of Israel stopped Nasser from being able to march troops into Syria to crush dissent, then sure, but the actual reason the UAR collapsed was because Syrians felt the Egyptians had turned their country into a colony under Egypt's control and not into an equal partner. The existence of Israel is a logistical hurdle to the formation of a united Arab/Muslim state, but the real obstacle to such a state is that nobody wants it, and those who experienced it for the briefest moment discovered that they hated it.
Gaddafi tried to create a unified state with Tunisia as well, on the same theory of Islamic unity. It fell through because Algeria's secular, Arab nationalist government threatened to invade Tunisia if the union materialized. Israel had even less to do with that failure.
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Jordan and Israel represent the two sides of the Middle Eastern coin as envisioned by the British orientalists of the early 20th century, whose role America eventually partially took over.
On one side were the Jews, mostly shtetl dwellers and assorted Levantine merchants, led by what was hoped to be a more civilized caste of Western European types, raised and educated in England and to a lesser extent France, who were first-rate supporters, much like the Scots, of Empire. Cecil Rhodes himself was, after all, an agent of the Rothschild family, and every early piece of lobbying by wealthy Anglo-French Jews for Israel was predicated on it being an outpost of Europe in the Orient.
The flipside of the coin was that many British and French aristos were themselves inheritors of a long tradition of orientalism, involving variously dashing Arab swordsmen, ancient desert customs, camels, the honor and nobility of a tribal culture, fanatic devotion to victory and God and so on. As the 19th century and early 20th centuries dragged on, the British were increasingly successful at having the heirs to various Middle Eastern monarchies sent to Eton and Sandhurst (quite a number still are). Jordan to some extent represents the epitome of this, the King is literally half British and descended from the colonial officer class on his mother’s side.
As the Middle East fell apart after Suez and the Americans realized the gravity of their mistake in not more vigorously opposing Nasser (which triggered a series of events that ultimately convinced the inhabitants of the region that they were once again in control of their destinies), the US tried, for various reasons, to shore up what was left.
On both sides of the coin though, the idea was that the respective ‘non-western’ aspects of the relevant cultures could be managed appropriately by Britain and eventually the US as successor state, and that it was best to keep the ‘good sort’ of person in charge, the kind who knew the etiquette at the right kind of Pall Mall club, or maybe at a DC charity gala. History may have disabused us of this notion, but it was a long time in the making.
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