naraburns nihil supernum
7mo 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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