naraburns nihil supernum
11mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #3
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.
International news organisation Reuters denied on Thursday any suggestion it had prior knowledge of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians and soldiers, in a statement responding to a report by media advocacy group HonestReporting.
"We are aware of a report by HonestReporting and accusations made against two freelance photographers who contributed to Reuters coverage of the Oct. 7 attack," Reuters said. "Reuters categorically denies that it had prior knowledge of the attack or that we embedded journalists with Hamas on Oct 7.
"Reuters acquired photographs from two Gaza-based freelance photographers who were at the border on the morning of Oct. 7, with whom it did not have a prior relationship. The photographs published by Reuters were taken two hours after Hamas fired rockets across southern Israel and more than 45 minutes after Israel said gunmen had crossed the border. "Reuters staff journalists were not on the ground at the locations referred to in the HonestReporting article."
In case you're thinking that 'My staff reporters were not involved in planning or executing a mass murder of civilians' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt", you're not alone. The HonestReporting summary if anything manages to undersell it, which is quite an accomplishment for a news story that involves the phrase 'lynch mob': people have since found on a photographer's facebook page a video of the man on a motorbike where the camera-holder or one of the other riders waves a grenade in-hand.
Journalistic ethics are a hard problem, and a harder one during wartime. It's typical for wartime embeds with conventional military forces to submit to often-onerous restrictions, sometimes to the point of requiring all releases to undergo pre-publication review (which should raise a number of Constitutional questions in the United States but mostly doesn't). There was a pretty major controversy in the mid-2000s after a Paris Match reporting team was on-scene at a missile strike targeting a mail carrier aircraft (Vernier-Palliez claimed that the militants had "set them up" and had no idea that they were going to commit a violent attack... though I think her claimed surprise is more than a little self-serving). And 'journalism' that's really just repackaged press releases from active members of a particular side are common enough outside of combat; the rewards are, if anything, simply greater for politics-by-other-means.
On the other hand, if your war reporting is little more than repackaged press releases from a group that slaughtered and raped civilians, while the reporting papers over all of that, this raises more than a few questions for that reporting's accuracy, as critics of journalists embedded with the IDF have long held. And that doesn't seem to be sinking in, here:
That'd be the guy with the grenade and cheerful embrace from Hamas leadership; CNN remains certain, among other things, that this summary is tots accurate and that the photographer's ties to Hamas' military arm tots don't leave any room for suspicion. Mahmud's main remaining photos on the AP database have at least been corrected to note that the dead 'Israeli soldier' was in fact a pacifist Israeli-German dual-citizen.
Okay, but these people weren't exactly weekly bylines. Indeed, they're just one of countless on-the-ground randos that various press agencies sent money and lent legitimacy. They're also just the ones dumb enough and unlucky enough to get caught, but let's leave that aside for now. One bit of that legitimacy is people believing the repackaged press releases, but a deeper one is the ability to wear and mark press credentials, a matter that has historically been considered worth protecting. There's even been clear cases where the IDF has wrongly killed journalists, and been criticized at length for it.
That just became far more difficult to maintain as a norm.
IDF arrived to the center of Gaza city. Both sides are surprised in a kind of mirror image. Hamas from how relatively Hamas defense lines were penetrated snd collapsed IDF because the advance was relatively fast and not too many casualties, which are in Gaza around 30.
It seems like common sense but we’ve now both in the Ukraine War, Armenian-Azerbaijan War and now in Israel, militaries seem to be convinced that tanks are fine by themselves and as a result are sitting ducks for infantry with anti-tanks weapons.
What’s going on? Why do militaries make such a dumb mistake again and again? Is there something I’m missing?
Israeli tanks have APS like Trophy that in theory mitigates a lot of the risk from RPGs.
Their vehicles are also designed to ensure crew safety above all else, even after a disabling hit.
Combining this with their low appetite for loss of human life, it might make sense to minimize the inevitable infantry casualties from dismounts accompanying vehicles by sending them in solo. Might, I have no specific insight into the outcomes of their doctrine, but for all the footage Hamas releases of close quarters RPG hits on such vehicles, footage of the burning wreckage in the aftermath seems lacking.
At the end of the day, there's no good way of clearing an urban hellhole, short of nuking it.
Because infantry can't run this fast and mechanized infantry is vulnerable to the same anti-tank weapons. Combined arms are hard. Even the US will struggle if you take away its CAS and artillery support.
You need to send your infantry forward so they can take out anti-tank weapons, but your tanks must be close enough behind that they can take out anti-infantry weapons that your infantry will encounter. Or your infantry has to have artillery support on call, which is vulnerable to counter-battery fire.
I'm talking about regular land warfare, sending tanks into cities that haven't been completely levelled is just wasting them.
How many Jews feel like this now? Glad you all are feeling how I’ve felt for a few years that your just an ethnic white now and hopefully we can ally. Eisman from the Big Short (funny how Jews pop up in any event) says all his family went to UPenn and UPenn is dead to them now.
I said a week or two ago if the Jews picked some random school like Eastern Kentucky it would be a top 5-10 school in a generation.
I always thought it was ultra cringe to have these rando finance guys’ names plastered over everything in academia, which should be above that. Hopefully schools learn their lesson and stop bothering with these clowns.
The list of top universities in 1960 is substantially the same as it is today.
Lots of places have tried to improve their rankings but it doesn't seem to work. Back in ancient times, I'm pretty sure Nebraska or some random school offered me a full ride based on my PSAT score. This strategy to recruit high-IQ students clearly didn't move the needle for them.
It’s because HYPS and the tier below schools always make sure to take the absolute best even as they also make sure to take donors’/board members’ kids and the requisite diversity intake.
So if normally the top 0.3% of graduating high schoolers would go to that tier of college under a purely meritocratic system, now only the top 0.1% go (math and physics olympiad winners etc) and so do those other groups. But because IQ has a very long tail, skimming off only the top 0.1% instead of 0.3% still means they get most of the best people - even if the system isn’t ‘fair’.
That would work if their product was education. I don't think a Harvard education is worth 200K more than free education. Now the signaling value (even if you get fired from every job you subsequently get for incompetence) and "I went to Harvard" card that you have for the rest of your life, 200K is probably a deal for that.
So he's angry that a certain number of protestors held up signs stating, "Free Palestine from the river to the sea," and now he wants to take his ball and go home?
Well I made the comment on purpose. Because Jews really do pop up everywhere despite their small numbers. I do it because they are an important people who contribute to civilization.
Are they having enough kids, and willing to spend enough money, that their influence can be applied to another school?
Why isn't yeshiva university considered a top school then, when it's mostly Jewish? Is it because they get the third tier, orthodox Jews, and not the first tier IQ ashkanazi secular Jews?
Prestige comes from rankings ie research ie faculty. In many STEM (and other) fields top departments are already substantially Jewish. Jewish parents sending their kids to Yeshiva University instead of Harvard won’t affect rankings, if any YU grad wants to go into academia at the top level they’ll go to Princeton or MIT or whatever for postgrad (if they can), and then if they’re good they’ll stay or move to a similar university. Very few YU grads go into academia.
For Jewish schools to poach the best Jewish faculty from the Ivies you’d need an overt, explicit purge of Jewish faculty from Harvard etc which just isn’t likely.
Someone here (or maybe on /r/themotte) opened my eyes to this idea. I'm sorry I can't find the post and credit you, various searches aren't helping me find it.
There exists an apparent mini-moral philosophy of always siding with the underdog. On the surface this has good feels: always side with the weak against the strong. In every conflict, between individuals or between nations, find out who the strong one is, and find out who the weak one is. The weak one is the one you should side with.
This is not as ironclad a moral imperative as it appears on the tin. The most extreme and simple form of the imperative's flaw is such:
Suppose Mr Rogers and some random homeless guy get into a fight.
These are the facts and they are not disputed: the homeless guy demanded Mr Rogers’ wallet and he said no. So, the homeless guy attacked him. Shocking everyone, Mr Rogers fights back ferociously, sending the homeless guy to the hospital. Mr Rogers escapes without a scratch.
Digging into the homeless guy's background reveals that he has been in and out of prison a lot. For theft and minor violent offenses, except he was most recently imprisoned for pushing random bystanders off of train platforms onto train tracks. He had been arrested before anyone died. The homeless guy was released from prison a few days before he got into a fight with Mr Rogers.
Mr Rogers is a saintly widely beloved media personality with a legendary benevolence towards all.
So. Should someone here be penalized?
An underdog fetishist might say yes, Mr Rogers should be penalized because he’s actually a member of an elite class whereas the deranged homeless guy is a member of an underclass. This is a perfect example of class struggle.
In my experience, most people consider the Palestinians the underdog here, but not everyone. Some consider Israel the underdog being propped up by the US.
Anyway, while I consider it morally confused, I contend people who would condemn Mr Rogers exist, and that if you're going to spend time debating an extremely nuanced complex situation like the Israeli/Palestine conflict with others, it's valuable to at least first figure out if your debate partner would always (e.g.) side with the homeless guy against Mr Rogers.
I mean, isn't this a.k.a "Intersectionalism?" This is the foundation of contemporary progressive thought: the weakest party in a power imbalance is the one who must be favored in that conflict. Being "Woke" is seeing the world as that series of power imbalances, and "Identity Politics" is being aware of one's own membership in one or more disempowered groups.
It's also the cornerstone of dramatic fiction, which is why IMO mass media is so confluent with progressive ideas and has become their most powerful delivery system.
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
dasfoo 11mo ago
Being "Woke" is seeing the world as that series of power imbalances, and "Identity Politics" is being aware of one's own membership in one or more disempowered groups.
It's also why "Woke" are terrified of what they call the alt-right: because the alt-right work exactly the same way, but have an alternative (and possibly more correct) view of who is more disempowered. Which, ironically, makes the Woke a conservative [privilege-safeguarding] movement and the alt-right a progressive [privilege-shuffling] one.
I think that in many fictional narratives, the correlation between being the good guy and being the underdog is high. "David kills Goliath" is a story, "David becomes the 35th person to be killed by Goliath" is not. Hence Frodo vs Sauron, Harry vs Voldemort, Asterix vs the Romans.
Of course, in reality, the correlation between good guy and underdog is, to the first approximation, zero.
Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope--are we talking about Israel vs. Hamas, Israel vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world that funds them, or Israel + its supporters in the US vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world? The homeless guy vs. Mr. Rogers scenario doesn't quite capture the dynamic of group vs. group when each side has debateable membership.
That said, I don't favor underdog analysis as a particularly useful lens, though clearly others disagree.
Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope--are we talking about Israel vs. Hamas, Israel vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world that funds them, or Israel + its supporters in the US vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world?
That's one of the interesting things about power... local power can be a massively different beast than total power, or even future local power.
"My garden may be smaller than your Rome, but my pilum is harder than your sternum", and all that.
Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope
To me, this is one of the key issues of the whole thing which makes it just a non-starter. The degrees of freedom there are in determining who is the underdog and who isn't is effectively infinite, because human capability of self-deception is effectively infinite. So if one takes on the framework of the "righteousness of the underdog," then step 1.00001 that follows immediately after this is to deem [whoever I like] as the underdog, while twisting logic in any way required to reach that conclusion. By the time we reach step 2, step 1.00001 is long forgotten, and any scrutiny about that step is shut down as picking on the underdog who has been Firmly and Uncontroversially Determined to be the Underdog in this situation. It's just naked bias and favoritism with a particularly flattering narrative that makes it easier for people to believe even when they like to think of themselves as disliking naked bias and favoritism.
This is why when I hear "punching up" and "punching down" in the context of comedy or satire or the like, I always translate "up" to "direction I want punches to be thrown" and "down" to "direction I don't want punches to be thrown;" in practice, that's what they mean and only what they mean.
That said, I don't favor underdog analysis as a particularly useful lens, though clearly others disagree.
Maybe you debate people more aligned with you than I do; there are legit people who condemn Mr Rogers in this, what I consider, pathologically slanted absurd example and I often wish I had known that way ahead of time.
To me that reveals a kind of moral confusion that makes the finer scope points a more first world issue.
Yeah, that's a fair point. If someone's seriously taking the side of the homeless guy in your example, I don't know what I'd do with that information other than backing away slowly.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
dr_analog 11mo ago
This seems like a similar observation to Arnold Kling's three languages of politics framework. He states this as progressives thinking in terms of oppressor-oppressed dynamics, conservatives thinking about civilization-barbarism, and libertarians thinking about freedom-authoritarianism. There are obviously times where these overlap, but other times it results in people talking right past each other. I think you can see this starkly, at least for conservatives and progressives, when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Without regard to finalized policy prescriptions, the basic sympathies of progressives seem to always lie with Palestinans, who they see as oppressed, while conservatives side with Israel because it's the civilized side. Often, the language used by liberals and conservatives even puts it explicitly in those terms.
"Civilization-barbarism" is a terrible lens for international conflict, you can easily whip up people into a frenzy with atrocity propaganda - bayoneted nuns or babies taken from incubators.
Freddie deBoer confuses me on this point, because he was once writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict and stated “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg.”
But he has also argued repeatedly that "punching up" and "punching down" is a meaningless framework through which to look at humour, interpersonal relationships or anything else.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
Folamh3 11mo ago·Edited 11mo ago
“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg.”
When I read this, I think to myself, "yeah, this is why I hate Marxists". Openly admitting that it doesn't even matter who is right, they'll just always side with whoever they think is weaker is a recipe for the dissolution of civilization.
The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry — a small governmental body that produces policy research and shares its proposals with intelligence agencies, the army, and other ministries. It assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the framework of the current war, and recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. It also calls on Israel to enlist the international community in support of this endeavor. The document, whose authenticity was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972.
The existence of the document does not necessarily indicate that its recommendations are being considered by Israel’s defense establishment. Despite its name, the Intelligence Ministry is not directly responsible for any intelligence body, but rather independently prepares studies and policy papers that are distributed to the Israeli government and security agencies for review, but are not binding.
The document recommends that Israel act to “evacuate the civilian population to Sinai” during the war; establish tent cities and later more permanent cities in the northern Sinai that will absorb the expelled population; and then create “a sterile zone of several kilometers … within Egypt, and [prevent] the return of the population to activities/residences near the border with Israel.” At the same time, governments around the world, led by the United States, must be mobilized to implement the move.
The transfer plan is divided into several stages. In the first stage, action must be taken so that the population of Gaza “evacuates south,” while the air strikes focus on the northern Gaza Strip. In the second stage, a ground incursion into Gaza will begin, leading to the occupation of the entire Strip from north to south, and the “cleansing of the underground bunkers of Hamas fighters.” Concurrently with the re-occupation of Gaza, Palestinian civilians will be moved into Egyptian territory, and not be allowed to return. “It is important to leave the travel routes to the south open to enable the evacuation of the civilian population toward Rafah,” the document states. According to an official in the Intelligence Ministry, the ministry’s personnel stand behind these recommendations. The source stressed that the ministry’s research is “not based on military intelligence” and serves only as a basis for discussions within the government.
This is a big step and I'm surprised I've only seen it retweeted once by Adam Tooze and nowhere else. I'm sure it's big on the Arabic internet, but I'm not plugged in to Muslim conspriacy theories. Obviously ideas like this have been mooted around theMotte and everywhere else, but for it come from the Israeli government is new. Thoughts:
-- For this to be planned doesn't mean it is really going to happen. I'm sure somewhere in the Pentagon there are plans put together, if only as exercises, for invading Canada, Mexico, and Jamaica. This could all mean nothing. That is probably not going to be very persuasive to people who already figured that Israel wanted to do this. Ironically, once again in this conflict, I expect the loudest voices telling me that this won't happen and isn't real to be those who have previously advocated for exactly the policy of ethnic cleansing. A new application of the good ol' law of merited impossibility.
-- The paper is dated 10/13. I've lost track of time quite a bit lately for personal reasons, when exactly did Israel begin bombing Northern Gaza and encouraging civilians to remove South? Because it sure looks like they're following the plan outlined in step 1 of Option C: move civilians south. That is going to be viewed as strong proof by Muslims that this is going on; and it is going to lead to tragedy. This document is going to be used to encourage Gazan civilians not to evacuate, which is going to lead to Hamas having a much thicker human shield, which is going to lead to thousands upon thousands of extra deaths. Regardless of its validity, the release of this document is unquestionably a tragedy.
-- The leak could also be a test balloon to see just how bad public reaction to this is. "We're not doing it, we're just brainstorming, no bad ideas, just talking about it...unless?"
-- I'm unfamiliar with the geography of the region, how habitable is the Sinai? My impression from the Bible and occasional references in history is that it ain't great, that Egypt has essentially no use for it beyond controlling the canal. Can you build an actual functioning city in the Sinai? Or is it just an open air prison, by which I mean the population can't leave and would be permanently dependent on imports of food/water? What bribe would Egypt require to open/allow/maintain this prison? Can you trust Egyptian jailers to keep the prisoners in, or will this lead to injecting a million radicals into Egypt's population, probably destabilizing the secular government there? A lot of people like to say "why not just turn Gaza into Singapore?" but is there any realistic universe of economic development in a brand new city in the Sinai?
-- The paper itself...seems pretty persuasive? It compares the De-Hamas-ification of Gaza to the DeNazification plans in Germany after WWII, which took at least seven years of occupation by Allied powers. Arguably the occupation of Germany hasn't ended yet. Seven years of occupation in Gaza would be giving every angry Arab a chance to take a pot-shot at a Jew, every day, for seven years. And gives Hezbollah all the time in the world to plan a Northern front. And PA rule of Gaza has failed before, so maybe it comes right down to where we started. A Final Solution to the Gaza problem has obvious rational appeal. But partition and resettlement is never achieved easily, and never without significant deaths. From a perspective that privileges Israeli Jewish lives over any other value, Option C is probably the right call...on the other hand...
-- Option C is likely to join our collective vocabulary alongside The Final Solution, the Gulag Archipelago, The Situation has Developed Not Necessarily to Our Advantage, Naqba, Pogrom. The expulsion of a population the size of metro Philadelphia is going to be a huge human tragedy inflicting great human suffering on actual people. This suffering, death, impoverishment, and destruction is going to inspire feelings across the Dar Al Islam. While the paper is optimistic about achieving support from the Saudis, Egyptians etc I see no way that the normalization of relations will move forward after Option C.
I don't mean to be an /r/readanotherbook fashion victim, but the situation in Gaza is so obviously to me the plot of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The big event is the potential for peace between the gulf Arabs and Israel, which would be a huge step towards a permanent and sustainable end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. And Hamas' 10/7 attacks were designed, by Hamas, to torpedo that diplimatic process between SA and Israel. The goal of Hamas' attacks was to provoke Israeli reaction, that will make it impossible for the Saudis et al to accept Israeli diplomacy. And the Israelis, in their infinite wisdom, are deciding to do exactly what Hamas hoped they would do, and hoping that if they do it harder and better than Hamas thought they would do it that they'll win. That seems like a fool's bargain. Blessed are the peacemakers. We may have trouble living in the undiscovered country that is peace, but that future should be the one we're striving for, and I'm not sure that Option C leaves much room for it any time soon.
Spongebob-grade thinking: since we're already being practical but evil in talking up mass civilian displacements, why not Simply(tm) move the population of Gaza to the West Bank, annex Gaza, and freeze Area C settlement in place or abandon Area C? This removes all need for Area C settler shenanigans, enables mass filtration and registration, re-establishes Israel as both massively powerful in the region and comparatively generous about it in tangible terms that an honor culture understands, moves Hamas militants and sympathizers into an area both more amenable to policing and a population with a chance of assimilating them into prosperous coexistence, simplifies the security situation by removing an unfriendly border...
This is, of course, an evil act in many ways, and I don't endorse it as a plan of action, but it's been bouncing around my head and I wanted it out. Why's it impractical and more expensive than necessary?
Because Area C is a huge strategic weak point for Israel and essentially needs to be under de facto occupation for Israel to have any strategic depth. It has a much larger border with Israel than Gaza and - unlike Gaza, has a land border with Jordan where smuggling routes are arguably easier than Gaza’s with Egypt (ie you don’t have to traverse the entire Sinai).
I’m considering that this is likely a deliberate leak as psychological demoralization. There’s little chance that a state that relies so heavily on intelligence could just accidentally release a plan for essentially ethnic cleansing at the start of the war and before there are ground troops taking the territory. For one, it’s something that even as a plan creates huge ick responses from most potential Allies in the West who have been taught since preschool that ethnic cleansing is a horrible thing that only evil people do. The wider Arab world will like it even less. The plan isn’t going to work.
But if I’m trying to convince civilians to flee and the less zealous fighters to desert, the prospect of everyone in Gaza being either killed or driven into a tent city in Sinai is probably something that would demoralize. They’re being told that flee or die are the only options on the table. If you have a family in Gaza you’ll probably be much more likely to try to leave than to pick up a weapon.
They’re being told that flee or die are the only options on the table. If you have a family in Gaza you’ll probably be much more likely to try to leave than to pick up a weapon.
Not really.
They're saying your options are:
Leave Gaza and you will never be able to return. You will probably end up living in some kind of permanent prison tent city in the Sinai, where no one will particularly want to help you out and there is no clear future for you or your family, except that we are making it clear that under no circumstance will you ever return to your current home.
Stay in Sinai, and of course you may die, but Israel is unwilling to occupy Gaza if the civilian population remains in Gaza. Israel is only willing to or capable of invading if the Gazans leave. The paper makes that point in its review of Options A and B, which envisioned an invasion and occupation of Gaza without ethnic cleansing. Israel views the casualties, both their own and Gazan civilians', as unacceptably high in the scenario where the population remains in Gaza, and believes that it will be forced to withdraw and that the mission of controlling Gaza will fail.
Now, if they could make Option 1 realistically and credibly sound more like: move to Minnesota or Germany or Riyadh, with a path to citizenship and a little money/starting help; then a lot would take that deal. Right now it sounds more likely you'll end up in some awful camp, hoping nothing bad happens to give Egyptians or Israelis an excuse to kill you. Or maybe if Option 2 sounded more like "On December 7th we will drop a series of atomic bombs on Gaza, working our way south, whether anyone is there or not, engaging in what amounts to Civil Engineering by Nuclear Bomb to thoroughly level Gaza from tip to tip." Because right now it sounds more like "We don't have the stones to invade if you stay, so please leave."
But reading the whole paper, what I get out of it is: Leave Gaza and you will be exiled forever to a place where you will live at the whim of those who despise you; stay in Gaza and we will not have the will to outlast you, you will ultimately prevail. Given the themes and virtues of Palestinian culture for the past 80 years, which do you think they will pick?
This reminds me very strongly of the argument made that the USA sent a mixed message to Putin before the Ukraine invasion by offering an escape to Zelensky et al: Please don't invade, but if you invade you will win easily. Putin picked up on that message, to his regret.
I've seen the document bounced around, in some cases by people that consider it alone sign of IDF illegitimacy and possible (charitable) motivation for a lot of the heavier resistance by Biden et EU. I'll caveat that the Israel Intelligence Ministry looks like one of many Likud sinecures, rather than a group with power or even particular competence.
That doesn't prevent it from being a trial balloon, but this document is definitely not a 'plan' in the wargames-invading-Canada sense. I've seen more serious analysis done on cocktail napkins.
The paper's "Option C" might be persuasive if you squint, but only under the assumption you can do five impossible things before breakfast. You just have to pressure Egypt (1) and Europe (2) to intake millions of refuges, without massive loss of life (3), get the new refuges to move (4) somehow filtering out at least a large portion of those with terrorist interests (5). The point where it's trying to send an advertising campaign(!) to tell Gazan residents that they're going to permanently lose their land (!!) because "Allah made sure you lose this land because of Hamas’ leadership"(!!!) is the most word game of word games possible.
But there are deeper issues, even presuming it could be done. Hamas-in-Sinai will not stop hating Jews. They will not, as Lebanon has shown, stop lobbing rockets into Israel. The goal is that it'll be harder for them to do worse, but the tradeoff is that after that point kinetic action becomes a possible act of war. The closest relevant city is Arish in northern Sinai: note that <200k population. Northern Sinai isn't as mountainously untraversable as the middle and south, but it's still a desert. Maintaining a million-plus population tent city might be possible (if at a massive financial and humanitarian cost), and people have successfully built cities-in-deserts before, but there's no real honest way to expect it to happen here.
That doesn't put it off the table -- I don't have any good ideas myself! But I don't think these three options are the only available choices, nor that this paper evaluates them honestly.
What would be the point? Instead of firing rockets from Gaza they'll fire them from Sinai. If the Israeli military could enforce a DMZ we wouldn't be talking about this right now.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
sarker 11mo ago
I mean this is probably never going to happen, but having a couple of hundred miles of Negev desert/mountains between you and them makes it really hard for them to repeat a 10/7. Easier surveillance for Israel, Much more logistics needed for Hamas, etc.
Arguably the occupation of Germany hasn't ended yet.
That seems stretching term occupation quite far. Are you going to argues that Japan and South Korea are also occupied by USA?
It also calls on Israel to enlist the international community in support of this endeavor.
Do they want also a pony? And eternal youth? Egypt was already floating/threatening "and we will take all of them to Europe" or "take them to Europe if you want".
The goal of Hamas' attacks was to provoke Israeli reaction, that will make it impossible for the Saudis et al to accept Israeli diplomacy. And the Israelis, in their infinite wisdom, are deciding to do exactly what Hamas hoped they would do, and hoping that if they do it harder and better than Hamas thought they would do it that they'll win. That seems like a fool's bargain.
Yeah, sadly so far Hamas is clearly winning. Or at least losing less than Israel.
That seems stretching term occupation quite far. Are you going to argues that Japan and South Korea are also occupied by USA?
Yes, obviously. Why would I say otherwise? A nation that has tens of thousands of soldiers from another country is occupied. That asking them to leave seems like it would be basically impossible with current political constraints further solidifies that this is an occupation, albeit a polite and friendly one. Some countries are better to be occupied than others, the Romans and Americans were both civilizing influences that protected the interests of their clients and vassals, but this is still what occupation looks like.
The difference between "occupation" and "allies" or "mercenaries" is that you can politely ask "allies" or "mercenaries" to leave, and they will pack up and go, whereas once you are occupied you lose that ability forever. Guantanamo Bay is occupied. Korea is not.
In the 1950s one could plausibly say that the US was occupying Korea. US troops based in the center of Seoul propped up dictators that benefited US interests. However, fifteen years ago the democratically elected Korean government asked the US to get its troops out of Seoul. The US did. Now there is a large swath of vacant land between the old city and Gangnam. The US is still in Korea, but critically the US garrison in Korea is maintained on the request the Korean government. The relationship is mutually beneficial: the US gains a base of operations counter Chinese expansion, and the Koreans gain a tripwire against North Korean expansion. In particular, the Koreans are willing to pay to keep the US troops garrisoned: when Trump hinted at leaving, the Korean side fussed and then increased their side of the bill. (Japan picked up the whole bill right away without a fuss, because Japan knows it is in their interest to pay to stay in the Pax Americana.) So Korea and Japan willing to pay to be "occupied"? That's not a military occupation by any definition I know. (I don't know anything about Germany but suspect the situation is similar.)
Yes. I would say that Japan and Germany are both still somewhat constrained in their sovereignty and freedom of movement by the presence of US military bases on their territory, and by the international system those bases symbolize.
Moreover, consider the parallel: an Israeli base in Gaza would be a constant target.
Though I would not call it occupation - I would say that calling PRL (communist period in Poland) a "Russian occupation" is already unusual stretching of this term.
If what happens in Germany is occupation then you may as well consider USA to be occupied by Israel AND Hamas.
I'm mostly being cheeky, but I feel like to properly define Occupation we first need to define Sovereignty and Freedom and all those other fun words and philosophical concepts, along with gaming out counterfactual scenarios where Germany tries to leave the American world-system.
An occupation in my mind is ongoing where you have 1) Foreign troops not drawn from your sovereign state and not under the control of your sovereign state deployed in your sovereign state whose presence 2) significantly restricts the state's sovereignty.
Is obviously satisfied, American troops are neither drawn from nor under the control of Germany
Is where it gets sticky, because German sovereignty is obviously restricted in some ways by the potential consequences of betraying the American system, but Rammstein is more symbolic of the consequences of leaving that system than the enforcer of those consequences, so is their presence the thing restricting those actions?
2a) Then we get into defining Sovereignty. Extremists like 18th-century-radicals along the heart of Kulak will define sovereignty as the complete freedom to do whatever the sovereign chooses, of course no state has ever had that kind of freedom to act. Medieval kings are almost emblematic of sovereignty, but if they made too big a move they would face consequences that would restrict their actions. Is Germany's range of action more restricted, or its consequences faced more severe, such that we say that it is totally restricted in its sovereignty? I don't know.
2b) Defining freedom of action. Would the American troops stationed in Germany be able to physically prevent Germany from invading Poland? Probably not by force, but it is possible that by cutting supply chains that run through those bases and the greater universe of NATO cooperation the USA could make it impossible for Germany to invade Poland.
On balance I don't know if it fully qualifies, but it is certainly close enough to point to as an exemplar of what Israel is in for. Does Israel want to have bases in a Gaza still full of Palestinians 60 years from now?
From a purely practical standpoint, if the Israelis launch a full scale campaign in Gaza, most of the city likely won't be standing when it's done.
So better to get the civilians out if possible, and I don't see the death toll or humanitarian crisis as likely worse than living in bombed out ruins. The people of Gaza are already close to maximally hostile as far as Israel is concerned as they can be without turning into literal zombies, so I don't blame them in the least for getting them off their doorstep.
I've been reading a lot about "humanitarian aid" sent into Gaza (by now hundreds of trucks). Does anybody know any source that lists what exactly is being sent? Like this amount of flour, this amount of insulin, this amount of water, etc.? The corporate press is being its usual useless self, resorting to facts only when they absolutely have no other choice, but maybe somebody knows some more obscure, but useful publication, that track what and how many is being sent?
I never had much of an opinion on the whole Israel-Palestinian affair, because — true to my brand — I avoid opining on what I know nothing about. My horrified reaction to Hamas's attacks morphed into existential despondency when I saw others cheering on the massacres with inexplicable glee. My curiosity was piqued, so I read up on the topic with the specific goal of understanding what could motivate joy as a response to carnage. I expected a heavy slog and wrenching ethical dilemmas, all submerged within murky ambiguity. Instead, I was very surprised at how lucid the delineations of the conflict were, and how lopsided the moral clarity was.
I very quickly shifted from 'ignorant agnosticism' towards generally favoring Israel's position on the matter (I can't recall ever changing my mind on an issue so dramatically). I don't want to turn this into a "midwit deludes himself into thinking he's a savant after some Wikipedia perusal" meme — I'm absolutely no expert, but I can't grasp what I'm missing.
I'll start with my opinion on various facets of the conflict, and then finish off with some theories I have for why this issue generates such implacable disagreement.
Motte-and-Bailey: I admit, I never knew what 'Zionist' meant except as a grave denunciation yet the Zionist movement has been fairly transparent about its goals from its beginning in the 19th century. You could categorize its aim across a spectrum, simplified from least to most radical: 1) Jewish homeland somewhere,[1] 2) Jewish homeland somewherein the Levant, and 3) Exclusive and total Jewish domination of the entire Holy Land. Both pro & anti-Zionism labels have a strategic ambiguity that can be intentionally levered by any extremist wishing to blend in the crowd. There's a similar dynamic with the Palestinian chant 'From the river to the sea', because is it calling for totally and completely erasing Israel from the map? Or is it simply advocating for a coexisting independent Palestine in both the West Bank (river) and Gaza (sea)? Whatever you want! I see the motivations for a Jewish homeland in the Levant to be sound and understandable. The scattered Jewish diaspora suffered unrelenting oppression across millenia virtually anywhere they went, culminating in some particularly nasty pogroms within the Russian Empire in the late 19th century. The general land borders the Zionists agreed upon weren't pulled out of thin air, and although the-land-formerly-known-as-Canaan exchanged bloody hands multiple times, the area historically represented the only cogent Jewish political entities to have ever existed. Zionist migration had already begun in earnest throughout the early 20th century, and the horrors of the Holocaust only further emphasized the necessity for a Jewish state.
Palestinian Land: The area was already inhabited by Arab Muslims by the start of early Zionist migration. The Arabs too have a historical claim to the area and also benefited from being last in the very long list of adverse possession feuds. If a stranger shows up to your figurative house and suggests taking only 20% in response to your attempts to evict them, it's not unreasonable to tell them to fuck off. The Zionists had way more of a diplomatic bargaining chip after the Holocaust, but either way it wasn't unreasonable for the Arabs to reject ceding 56% of the land that was Mandatory Palestine. I don't want to frame this as a "shoulda negotiated" fable, but the practical outcome of the ensuing 1948 war resulted in the creation of Israel with about 78% of the territory. It's reasonable for any loser of a war to hold a grudge against their conquerors.
The Nakba: The human toll of the 1948 war on the Palestinians shouldn't be diminished or overlooked. The war resulted in around 25,000 total dead and the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians, an event forever commemorated by the Arabic word for "catastrophe" — Nakba. Displacement doesn't just mean a change of address; it was a wrenching life upheaval. The Nakba led to squalid refugee camps, outbreaks of diseases like typhoid, and the erasure of villages that had stood for centuries. Material and immaterial culture — homes, orchards, community centers, dialects, local traditions— were lost, perhaps irretrievably. This was very Bad and unfortunately all too common.
Vendetta Forever: Human history is rife with violence, often fueled by ancestral grudges. There's nothing wrong with suggesting that some blood feuds should have been abandoned long ago. Next door to Israel, the ongoing Syrian Civil War has a death toll (500k-600k dead) nearing that of the Nakba's displacement figure, alongside a global refugee crisis.[2] After 12 years of destructive stalemates, the best outcome Syrians can hope for is to solidify the current status quo; it's not plausible for any side to conclusively end the conflict without additional bloodbath. But imagine a Syrian refugee in Turkey disavowing this hypothetical ceasefire and instead pledging a lifelong vendetta — as well as the lives of all his future descendants — fixated on reclaiming his family's vineyard in Homs from Al-Assad's forces. The wounds are still fresh but steering someone away from such an insane and self-destructive fanaticism isn't unreasonable. And yet, that's not the reception Palestinian grievances from 1948 land grabs receive, despite their much older expiration date. I don't want to turn this into a catastrophe pageant competition; we can acknowledge the suffering someone's ancestors endured while also reminding those living that their unyielding attachment to past vendettas has only brought further ruin to themselves and their families. The fanatical obsession over relatively resource-barren land simply cannot be explained by just tallying up the generational wealth the expelled Palestinians lost out on; there's much more than is admitted to here (more on this later).
Arab Humiliation: After the 1948 war, Israel's borders were left on a standstill with an armistice agreement with Egypt taking over Gaza, and Jordan grabbing the West Bank. It's tediously irrelevant to litigate the 'who started it?' chain, but Israel (along with the UK and France) did indeed invade Egypt in 1956 over the Suez Crisis, though they pulled out after a week and Egypt agreed not to block their shipping lanes through the Straits of Tiran. In 1967, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria planned a surprise invasion against Israel but instead got absolutely trounced in what was named the Six Day War. Their invasion didn't just spectacularly fail on its intended merits, but everyinvading country lost significant territory to Israel's counter-offensive (Golan Heights from Syria, West Bank from Jordan, and Gaza Strip plus the entire fucking Sinai Peninsula from Egypt). The Arab League convened three months later and doubled down on their vendetta against Israel, issuing the Three Noes Resolution against Israel: No peace, no negotiation, no recognition. Not content with their first military invasion, they tried another surprise attack six years later in 1973. The Yom Kippur War wasn't as quick, taking slightly less than three weeks to resolve in yet another Israeli victory. It's hard to overstate just how much of an existential humiliation for the Arab world this time period was. The Arabs were ostensibly blessed by Allah Himself, and fighting in their home desert turf, and yet they couldn't put a dent on the Yahud? Knowing full well they couldn't match the Jews in conventional warfare, much of the Palestinian cause shifted towards "unconventional" methods of indiscriminate rocket attacks, suicide bombings, & kidnappings. It's reasonable to discount the Arab countries' self-serving claims about being motivated by the plight of the Palestinian people,[3] because instead of assisting them directly they squandered tens of thousands of lives on foolish military adventures.
Israel Sometimes Lies: Israel, like virtually any other government, has a history and incentives to lie about its actions. The most notable example is the 1996 Qana massacre where IDF lobbed artillery shells at a UN compound in Southern Lebanon, killing over 100 Lebanese civilians. The IDF has maintained it was all totally an accident and initially repeatedly denied they had any reconnaissance drones in the area, until serendipitous UN footage proved otherwise. In 2009, Israel initially denied ever deploying white phosphorus in Gaza, until the video evidence from journalists on the ground was too overwhelming to ignore. In the current phase of the conflict, Israel is simultaneously asserting that 1) Hamas militants were able to break through a heavily-monitored security fence and go on a rampage because of an unprecedented intelligence failure and 2) Israel has the capabilities to execute targeted strikes against Hamas leadership while minimizing civilian casualties within the urban jungles of Gaza. It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of any self-serving claims made by Israel absent any corroborating evidence.
Orthogonal Violence:I'm not a pacifist, but anyone who decides to deploy violence as a tool should be extremely careful they're not simply succumbing towards quenching a primeval bloodthirst. Any application of violence should be oriented towards a specific goal, proportional to the objective, and carried out with humility.[4] I wrote about how the relatively bygone Punch A Nazi discourse failed all three prongs: 1) vague hypothetical that the spread of dangerous ideas will be curtailed if enough "Nazis" are punched in the face, 2) Antifa's awful target acquisition meant random Bernie supporters got metal pipes to the skull, and 3) the violence enactors were generally extremely hostile to any criticism about their tactics. Within this narrow framework[5] I'm willing to say that the suicide bombing of CIA base involved in drone strikes in Afghanistan was justified, as was the targeted assassination of the architects behind the Armenian genocide, and as were either tête-à-tête military battles or guerilla actions between Jewish and Arab forces in 1948.
Perverse Excuses: In contrast, I find no justification for indiscriminate attacks on orthogonal targets. What exactly is the objective and how does murdering Olympic athletes, or bombing a discotheque, or bombing a pizzeria, or murdering bus passengers, or sniping a baby in a stroller get anyone closer to it? The rockets Hamas regularly launches against Israel are slap-dash affairs, jury-rigged from water pipes and common materials. There's no guidance system to speak of, and the most precise aim Hamas could hope for is [waves vaguely over the distance]. Their only practical purpose is to sow psychological trauma on a civilian population, which is as cogent of a definition for terrorism you could get. I don't believe I've encountered anyone directly defending the strategic merits of indiscriminate unguided rocket attacks, or music festival mass shootings. Instead, I see either excuses about how we outsiders shouldn't cast judgement upon the anguished and desperate actions of an oppressed populace, or affirmative declarations that "resistance" is justified through "any means necessary". Hamas leadership parrot this argument, as seen in this rare moment where Ghazi Hamad breaks into English to say that as the victims in this conflict, anything they do is by definition justified. This view is beyond heinous, because it has no bounds. It posits an insane moral outlook that once someone is anointed as sufficiently oppressed, their actions — no matter what! — are indefinitely beyond reproach or scrutiny. This is indistinguishable from how some of my domestic violence clients jettison any semblance of responsibility for their abuse, by focusing exclusively on how they were "provoked" into ripping out a chunk of their girlfriend's scalp. This is a framework I thought was too fucking stupid to entertain seriously, because the parody writes itself. We always can and must maintain the capacity to simultaneous condemn and empathize, without requiring us to plunge into the abyss of moral sociopathy. Jeffrey Dahmer's actions can't suddenly become righteous endeavors if he happened to be a Palestinian eating Israelis. And no matter how righteous a cause might be, it will never be worth having this as one of its Wikipedia pages.
Security Dilemma: I am a proponent of 100% open borders (for both trade & people) but concede it's not a tenable position during ongoing hostilities. It's true, both Gaza and the West Bank are surrounded by formidable security barriers that require Palestinians to be subjected to intrusive, arbitrary, and often humiliating security screening, but it was largely built in response to a wave of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada. I would love to see a free flow of goods and people but any security relaxation whatsoever is immediately exploited, with children as young as 14 regularly employed into martyrdom. I have no idea what the alternative solution is supposed to be here.
Placating the Extremists: Both sides™ of the conflict contend with warring internal strife. On the Israeli side, you have hardcore Zionists who are religiously motivated to habitate as much of the Promised Land as possible, chant "Death to Arabs", and are now forming roving gangs to dispense retributive violence in the West Bank and elsewhere. On the Palestinian side, you have Hamas and its implacable founding principles calling for the absolute and total elimination of all Jews, and a RETVRN to a worldwide caliphate. The messy logistics of coalition politics necessitates cooperating with unsavory actors lest the whole structure irreparably collapses. Any moderate who strays too far from the flock faces serious risk from the fanatics with any sizeable power, which is why Yitzhak Rabin's openness to a peace plan got him assassinated by a right-wing Jewish activist. This also explains Israel's unjustifiable & needlessly antagonist (IMO) settlement policy of sort-of-maybe-not-but-actually-yes encouraging civilian takeover of contested territory. This also explains Yasser Arafat's intransigence during the Camp David talks, refusing to provide any counter-offer after rejecting Israeli's proposal. The moderate wing of either side balances benefiting from the zealot's "enthusiasm", while also making sure not to scare the hoes (by hoes I mean the international community of course).
Apartheid State: Given the constant sloganeering about "Apartheid" and given that Israel was founded to be an ethnostate intended to prioritize the interests of a Jewish population, I was surprised to learn about the conditions of Arab-Israelis. 21% of the population is Arab — almost all of whom are Muslim. Arab-Israelis are nominally afforded the exact same rights as any other Israeli citizen, though there remains rampant disparities in income, employment, and municipal funding. I don't want to pull a Kendi here and claim the only explanation for disparate outcomes is discrimination, because it very well could be a 'pipeline problem' that stems from the aforementioned disparities in public services, or perhaps differences much more inherent. Arabs are exempt from Israel's compulsory military service, which traditionally provides a highly-respected advancement ladder. Arab-Israelis are allowed to volunteer though this virtually never happens but the ones that do are well assimilated into Israeli society, such as the highly-celebrated Captain Amos Yarkoni. But set all that aside for now and just assume that Arab/Jewish disparities are strictly the result of incessant discrimination. It's true that Arab-Israelis earn about 60% as much income as Jewish-Israeli households, yet this roughly translates into an average daily wage of $50 for Arab-Israelis compared to $32 in the West Bank, and $13 in Gaza. I don't know how directly comparable the ratios are to individual income, but as a rough metric Israel's $54k GDP per capita is more thanten times what is available in neighboring Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. By any material measure, Arab-Israelis fare much better under Israeli governance than under any neighboring Arab governance.
Decolonization Narrative: The "colonization" narrative is facile and misleading but let's assume the truth of the charge, what exactly is the complaint? I used to think the "only functioning democracy in the region" mantra was an exaggeration but no, it's true. Some Arab-Israelis even serve in parliament. If the worry is a lack of political self-determination among non-Jewish Israelis, the concern doesn't appear substantiated. Personally, political self-determination has little inherent value to me; it's useful only insofar as it helps foster governance better tailored to a community's needs and if the two aims are ever in tension, I will always prioritize material benefits (give me Hong Kong under British colonial rule over democratic India any day of the week). Israeli governance is already demonstrably vastly superior from a wealth perspective, so I don't understand the complaint lodged. I also personally would always prioritize a cosmopolitan open society over the self-determination of followers of a repressive religion, and nowhere is that schism funnier than with the unironic "Queers for Palestine". Palestinian culture has regressive aspects I have no interest in seeing replicated. Beyond economic comfort and civil freedoms, Israel has demonstrated a broader commitment to cosmopolitan multiculturalism, as illustrated by how the Temple Mount is governed. It's the former site of the destroyed Second Temple (Judaism's holiest site) which was later replaced by the Al-Aqsa Mosque (Islam's third holiest site) and despite its central importance within Jewish lore, I was surprised to find out that Israel has prohibited all Jewish prayer since its takeover of the area in 1967 after the Six Day War. The Temple Mount area is governed by a religious committee composed only of Muslims members. I can't fathom the countervailing scenario where Muslims are willing to prohibit prayers at Al-Aqsa.
Sorry for that encyclopedia up there, I had to get it out of my system. There are no doubt some valid Palestinian grievances scattered among the bloodied ashes above, but I can't shake off the conclusion that much of the unrelenting rage lobbed towards Israel is driven overwhelmingly by petty nationalistic pride, fanatical religious zealotry, or just plain ethnic bigotry. Again, I'm not saying all! Previously, I would roll my eyes at the reflexive refrain that any criticism of Israel is driven by anti-Jewish[6] bigotry. I was generally skeptical of bare allegations of bigotry in any context (as a baseline), but particularly within Israeli discourse given the potential for nationalistic motives to skew reasoning. Some of my skepticism remains warranted, but I readily admit I had seriously underestimated the ambient level of anti-Jewish bigotry.
There's been a real mask-off moment among the Pro-Palestinian movement, with no pushback against the atrocious message discipline. Shortly after Hamas' incursions, before Israel's Gaza pulverization campaign, we had crowds in Sydney with "Gas the jews!" chants. The posters of Israeli children kidnapped by Hamas continues to be irresistible bait for folks driven into an uncontrollable rage to tearing them down, and in the process showcasing their barely-veiled animosity. I feel like I'm insulting everyone's intelligence here because they're not even trying to hide it, otherwise why would anyone cite the expulsion of the Khaybar Jewish community by the Muslims in 628 CE supposedly to protest a country founded in 1948?
The early Zionists secured land through legal purchases, though the transactions were often made with absentee landlords and came as a surprise to the occupants. The Palestinian Arabs reacted with enmity towards the growing Jewish presence in the area, leading to a wave of deadly riots and revolts throughout the 1920s and 1930s. One way to describe the Palestinian reaction here is as violent anti-immigrant vigilantism fueled by racial animus. The enmity was obvious from the neighboring governments too; few instances in history rival the unequivocal refusal to even entertain negotiation or peace as a possibility, as expressed in the Khartoum Declaration. The closest historical analogue I could fathom is maybe Carthago delenda est but even that one was a warning about the threat of a geopolitical rival, not a promise to forever disavow any diplomatic entreaties.
It's funny how easily the phrase "economic anxiety" is lobbed as a punchline to skewer the notion that Trump supporters are motivated by anything except virulent racism. A couple hundred people wielding tiki torches is presented as definitive proof of America's enduring and widespread racism problem, but brays to slaughter the Yahudis is reflexively dismissed as understandable human reactions. If that's your position, the question always remains what evidence would convince you otherwise about their true motivations? If every call to arms about killing all the Jews can be justified within the oppression rubric, you now have an unfalsifiable theory that is immune from scrutiny.
There's an argument on the Palestinian "resistance" side I've seen from several sources that apes the misguided politics of Identitarian Deference. The idea being that someone's willingness to detonate a suicide vest among a crowd of people is conclusive proof of their desperation, because no rational person would do something so terminal unless they were truly pushed to the brink with no other option. In other words, their depravity is evidence of their virtue.
There are so many things wrong with this argument but what I'll focus on is its assumption of rationality, because human beings are capable of acting in all sorts of deranged ways for all sorts of reasons. We have cults whose members are subject to what is functionally elaborate mind control. We have debilitating mental illnesses that rob people's ability to tell what is real and what isn't. And of course, we have fanatical religions that can maintain a robust foothold despite indoctrinating its followers into self-obliteration.
Gaza polling is not totally reliable, but recent findings indicated tepid support for Hamas and its apocalyptic mission, clocking in only at 20%. Yet it's difficult to imagine how such a severe ideology can remain neatly contained within its own bucket. The mentality behind the Hamas militant gleefully bragging to his parents about all the Jews he killed cannot spawn out of thin air, nor could his parents' immediate emotionally-overwhelmed congratulations. The Hamas-run show Tomorrow's Pioneers aired the most deranged children's television segment I have ever seen. In one episode, children sang about how qualified they are for martyrdom (can you believe it gets worse?) and in another, the actual children of Reem Riyashi are invited to sing a song written from their perspectives, about how it's ok their mom couldn't hug them on the last day they saw her...because her arm was too busy holding a bomb.
What's the counter-argument here? Is the homicidal propaganda taken out of context? Is the claim that it's not representative? Maybe that's true, but how can you tell? It's baffling that anyone seriously believes the Palestinian cause is primarily motivated by someone's great-great-grandparent losing their farm 75 years. Al-Aqsa Mosque imagery is inextricably linked with the broader messaging. Hamas names everything after it (TV, brigades, floods, etc.), and Israel's administration of the Mosque itself remains a point of serious contention. Zealots are incentivized to garner broader support for their fanaticism by sanewashing it into palatability, and the unique amalgamation of revolutionary Marxism and Arab nationalism afforded a readily available mantle:
In this new reading, the possibility of transcendence outside history was reworked into the possibility of transcendence inside history through revolution. Salvation was secularized, and atheized, into temporal salvation brought on by a political collective will. That Islam is a philosophical totality to be achieved through national liberation and socialism, and progressive revolution against the forces of colonialism, Judaism (particularly as embodied in Israel), and reaction (embodied in conservative pro-Western Arab monarchies), became the generic message.
Longstanding land grievances get repackaged as anti-colonial struggle, and genocidal religious fanaticism gets rebranded as anti-imperialist resistance. So when we are presented with acts of extreme desperation, demanding our unquestioning empathy for their purported plight, we can decline. We have the capacity to think critically and carefully scrutinize their self-professed motivation and see if it's in accord with reality. Sometimes we are intentionally fed a misleadingly sanewashed narrative, and sometimes the behavior we're observing is not the result of rational faculties.
I did not revisit some personal interactions until recent events prompted otherwise. Whenever I visited my family back home in Morocco, no other topic generated as much acrimony as Israel. It's a common trope for home families to worry their emigrated members will be brainwashed into secularism, and bizarrely the most scrutiny I ever received from them about my life in the United States wasn't about whether I ate bacon or drank alcohol, but whether I was friends with any Jews. The Yahud aren't to be trusted, they warned, as evidenced by the fact that no Jew was ever killed on 9/11, or by the fact that Mossad created ISIS as a bid to make Arabs look bad (I'm not joking, these claims are unironically professed by several of my family members). I assumed their baffling conspiracies were the understandable byproduct of what had to be justifiable rage against Israel.
I admit deep embarrassment at how under-informed I previously was about this topic. Everything I wrote above took time obviously,[7] but it was all based on readily available sources (ChatGPT was also an amazing help in quickly filling in gaps and finding counter-arguments). My operating assumption used to be that this was all too complicated of an issue to untangle. I presume I might have been influenced by the underdog memeology of a child throwing a rock at a soldier.
I'm also willing to blame media coverage on this topic. This Vox video purporting to 'explain' Gaza is the perfect illustration of this genre of lying by omission. See how much it breezily glosses over the lead-up to the 1947 civil war:
In 1947, as the British prepared to leave they left the fate of Palestine up to a newly formed United Nations who voted to divide Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Soon, Zionist forces and militias began to forcibly expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land...
So the UN had a plan but the Jews responded by just kicking people out? Damn that's so crazy! That segue belongs in a museum somewhere, as it eviscerates decades of conspiracy theorizing about who really controls the media.
Ultimately, I find very little to sympathize with on the Palestinian cause. Except for the ongoing West Bank encroachments, I can't take any of the land grievances from 1948, 1967, or 1973 seriously; at least not seriously enough to justify the knee-deep bloodshed. I can't support any movement, no matter how righteous its cause might be, that employs sadistically orthogonal violence. I can't endorse any culture that punishes sexual and political non-conformity with forceful repression. And I want absolutely nothing to do with any ideology capable of such self-serving justifications towards its destructive fanaticism.
Despite the zealous wing in its own house, its history of covering-up its war crimes, and its ongoing settlement expansion campaign, Israel remains the obvious choice for whom to favor if I had to pick. I'm neither Jewish nor do I have any interest in a religious ethnostate, but out of the available options I'd much rather have a society that can build up material comfort enviable to its oil-laden neighbors, establish a semblance of multicultural cosmopolitanism, and provide a haven of responsive governance within a region known for its rarity.
I remain open to having my mind changed. You may attempt this in several ways, including but not limited to:
Point out any specific factual errors or misunderstandings in anything I wrote. If you believe any of my (mostly Wikipedia) sources are too biased or otherwise unreliable, explain why and suggest alternatives.
If you object to Zionism, specify what kind and why.
If you believe persistent Palestinian land grievances remain warranted today, be specific about which ones (Early migrations? 1948? 1967?) and explain why. Also make sure to specify if your standard applies to all displaced people anywhere else, or if it's unique to the Palestinians'.
If you object to how Israel deploys its military or security apparatus, specify if you disagree with their goals or with their tactics, and be specific about what they should do differently.
If you object to my comparative preference for Israeli's model of governance and culture, be specific about which aspects of Palestinian governance/culture have superior merits.
If you disagree with my criticism of oppression-status granting infinite moral immunity, be specific about what limiting principle you'd propose (if any).
That's it. Thank you for weathering through this with me.
[2] Around the same time as the Nakba, the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition resulted in up to 2M dead and up to 20M displaced. It feels unconscionably perverse to flatten the sheer scale of human tragedy here into a glossed reference to "millions" but it's all the time we have.
[3] Israel's Arab neighbors have had a contentious relationship with the Palestinian cause, despite the superficial optics. Palestinian Fedayeen for example tried to overthrow the King of Jordan in 1970. When they got expelled from Jordan, they tried to use Lebanon as a staging ground for attacks against Israel, events which culminated into the protracted Lebanese Civil War. And today, Egypt still enforces its half of the Gaza blockade.
[4] Only after writing this section did I realize I basically rederived the Just War Theory.
[5] For the love of Allah please remember that I am only assessing whether the violence is justified within the contours of bounded scenarios; I am not making any larger pronouncements about the righteousness of any side's cause.
[6] Anti-Semitism is such a misleading term as 'Semitic' is a language family, not an ethnic categorization, and includes Arabic!
[7] Many thanks to the Baileyites for their invaluable feedback.
I see the motivations for a Jewish homeland in the Levant to be sound and understandable.
Why? Why do Jews have a right to invade someone else’s land and ethnically cleanse the native populace? Why aren’t jews obligated to live in humanitarian multiculturalism like ever other western nation on the planet, and instead get violent ethnonationalism that inherently can not cohabitate with the non-Jewish natives of the land they are (violently) immigrating to? Why do the Palestinian people not have a right to resist this?
The area was already inhabited by Arab Muslims by the start of early Zionist migration.
“Arab” is not a real racial category. It’s a cultural one for speakers of Arabic. I see this a lot with people that are Israel apologists. Basically an attempt to delegitimize and dehumanize the Palestinians as a faceless and vaguely threatening barbaric mass. And an attempt to bring back the terra nullius justification argument for colonialism. Are you sure you were neutral and not… faking? Because you don’t sound it. You sound like a typical agenda’d and hardened culture warrior with all the same boilerplate.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Palestinians are not all Muslim, and it’s very interesting that pro-Israels keep talking about them like they are. There have been Christian Palestinians since about as long as there’s been Christianity. You haven’t outright said it, but this also seems to come with a completely ignorant but political motivated historical belief that the Palestinians are all foreign “Muslim” barbarians that come in at the 600s and took over the joint or something. That’s not how these things work. Egypt turning Muslim (also not all Muslim) did not replace the Egyptians.
There’s no reason to believe the canaanites and yes, Jews, of the area didn’t just convert - like everywhere else.
The Arabs too have a historical claim to the area and also benefited from being last in the very long list of adverse possession feuds.
Historical claim is putting it mildly and quite curiously. Yes, the Poles have a historical claim to their land in a conflict with Germans invading too. The Palestinians are natives of the land. The Zionists are not. Again, they are probably in no small part descendants of the Hasmonean kingdom that converted to Christianity and then Islam. Just as the English are descendants of ancient Celts that converted to Christianity and latin/germanized. There’s no reason to believe otherwise.
Next door to Israel, the ongoing Syrian Civil War has a death toll (500k-600k dead) nearing that of the Nakba's displacement figure, alongside a global refugee crisis.
The thing is though in the end Syria will still be Syria no matter what shitty dictator or not reigns in the future. Just as Russia weathered an Ivan the Terrible or 2. A war to straight steal land and displace the natives is a whole other kettle of fish. That preeminently changes the geography of the planet and destroys a people in an area forever. The Taino will never come back to the world after the Spanish colonial conquest of the Caribbean. Some things can’t be reversed or 2 things at once.
Being OK with this means accepting on the world scale permanent malevolent wars of conquest as a valid tactic (see Russia right now for why that’s a problem) without any real defensive casus belli. The nature of Zionism means the invaders fundamentally won’t and can’t cohabitate with the natives whose lands they are “moving” to. Their gain comes from the flesh of the other. On the ground, this makes it totally zero sum. That’s not that usual for war actually.
There's no guidance system to speak of, and the most precise aim Hamas could hope for is [waves vaguely over the distance]. … I see either excuses about how we outsiders shouldn't cast judgement upon the anguished and desperate actions of an oppressed populace, or affirmative declarations that "resistance" is justified through "any means necessary".
There’s value to what you say. But let’s consider the opposite. What value is there in passivity? Look to the West Bank and see what a more passive stance has achieved. Nothing but further expansion of Jewish colonies and a tightening noose around the Palestinians’ neck. That’s pretty damning. I think it’s objective at this point that “just be more peaceful” is an utter failure and an invitation to personal destruction.
Let’s go there and consider a case of a Jew in Auschwitz. He somehow finds himself in a position to kill a guard’s, who is an avid assistant in mass killing, wife and child. Is it moral and right to do so? If I were in that situation I don’t know what I would do. Per your own arguments, there’s a very, very strong case to be made that innocent should not be hurt. But oh how it stings. At the same time, what good does such moralism do? If the Jew passively lays down and lets the Auschwitz system do its thing without any karmic vengeance, however unfairly undirected, what good does it do? It only assists and convenience an evil act without any consequences.
A key here is that Zionists jews and the proverbial guard put themselves and the “innocent” into a position of aggression and violence. They woke up and chose to wrong another every day. And they could stop at any point if they really cared. They are betting on power saving them from any blowback for their actions. Weakness, only reifies this into being and, from a certain point of view, enables evil into the world. It’s not the same thing as walking up to a random baby and stabbing it for some vague incoherent goals. They could always choose peace.
This is why I suspect the myth of Israel ever giving a damn about the “peace process” (puke) is so popular with Israel apologists. People desperately need to believe Zionists are something other than what they are to apologize for them in normie morality. Like they just tripped, fell, and accidentally violently invaded another people’s land and constantly expanded - to this day. They could always choose not to do this. They could always go back to the 1967 lines and respect the Palestinians. They won’t. Ever.
Your analogy to a self justifying spousal abuser is apt and good food for thought. But are you not by your own admission a person on Israel’s side? Are you not really just asking for the Palestinian’s to conveniently to “let it happen”? What good does moral passive acceptance do? It only make Israel’s job of destruction of the Palestinian people easier. The Zionists do not want the Palestinian’s to exists in “their” territory, which includes all the homeland of the Palestinian people. They, again, by nature can not cohabitate or play nice. This is an existential war of total destruction.
In the end we are all dead. It’s highly questionable to kill the proverbial guard baby in a vague attempt to hurt the guard. But if you are a moral person and do nothing you die anyways. How much better is that than if you became an evil person that died and gave the forces of evil some karmic consequences for their actions that in the end also amounted to nothing?
I am a proponent of 100% open borders
This is an old post that was questionable to reply to but this is laugh and half. No you aren’t. No apologist for Zionism is. It’s logically impossible.
I have no idea what the alternative solution is supposed to be here.
One state solution? Again, like every western nation is expected. An immediate reversal of “settlements” (colonies) would be a start.
Given the constant sloganeering about "Apartheid" and given that Israel was founded to be an ethnostate intended to prioritize the interests of a Jewish population, I was surprised to learn about the conditions of Arab-Israelis.
You seem to heavily hinting without stating here that Israel doesn’t really want to be a racially pure Jewish ethnostate. That it took in Palestinian “Arabs” out of multicultural acceptance and not grudging forced calculation.
Did you know Israel has anti-miscegenation laws? There are probably others on the planet but Israel is literally the only one I know of that exists in the modern day. Other examples would be pre civil rights USA and Nazi Germany. It’s not legally possible for for a Jew to marry a non-Jew such as an “Arab.” If Israel did not want to be a racially pure as possible ethnostate the right of return would be a non-issue and the highly demonstrative contrast of Birthright/Taglit free travel tours and citizenship for vaguely Jewish diaspora would not be a thing.
But to be clear, the apartheid charge is for the occupation and treatment of Palestinians outside of Israel proper. At least to me.
One of the first red pilling experiences I had was a family member visiting the West Bank, for non-polticidal reasons, and learning multiple things (they were the often politically erased Palestinian Christians). First how normal and civilized they were. But second that there were checkpoint guards everywhere even in “Palestinian” territory. Palestinians encounter Jews all the time. Jews that absolutely will give your brother a hard time for being a non-Jewish male, and absolutely deeply racially hate you to the very core for being different from them - the enemy. And against popular news implication, they actually don’t all blow up everyday in spastic violence despite constant encounters and humiliation. It blew my mind that you could be Christian and live couple kilometers from the birth and death places of Jesus and just have to decide it’s not worth it to visit holy sites for Easter or Christmas. The Jewish checkpoint guards that sit between your home in Ramallah and “East” Jerusalem will absolutely give your family a hard time and maybe imprison someone for some imagined offense of just shoot. Who’s going to stop or punish them? I instantly understood where the 14 year old rock throwers came from ,where before I was always confused and thought them such savage retards. The West Bank is the Jim Crow South on steroids, but you’ll never see it presented that way to the dipshit BLM libs that watch CNN.
What’s more, Israel blockades Gaza. This would be an illegal act of war if it was a sovereign nation, which the MSM acts like it is for propaganda convenience currently. But it’s not. Nor is it annexed and given equal human rights like it should be, if it’s not a foreign entity. The ever fake “peace process” (spits) acts as a shield to keep the situation in a convenient limbo. This is the apartheid.
The "colonization" narrative is facile and misleading
It’s objective fact. I always don’t know if people arguing against this are simply historically confused or outright cynically lying. A meandering linked article isn’t going to change anything.
The early Zionists secured land through legal purchases, though the transactions were often made with absentee landlords and came as a surprise to the occupants.
Okay yeah, here we go. +1 point for the not really confused category. There is no such thing as legal valid permanent exclusionary “purchases” of land/people in a society that has no democratic representation. Let’s be clear about something, this was all done with non-voluntary coercive state violence. That’s why it’s a conflict. No one asked the Palestinians until the situation got really, really bad.
Palestine is unique in that it was colonization on behalf of another party. Ethnic replacement colonization is actually pretty rare (e.g. the British left India as India). But normally it would be the colonizers ethnically cleansing the natives. Here the colonized received the action at the barrel of a gun, but for Jews. Probably because the British just didn’t give shit. But that doesn’t change the experience for them.
If the Palestinians had a self-determined state with their own laws and army Zionism NEVER would have happened. That’s pretty clear and absolutely key. No nation concedes to letting foreigners slow invade their land by “purchasing” land with an intent to never again ethnically cohabitate with the native people effectively zero-sum removing it from the former nation. Hell, Americans can’t even purchase own Mexican land at all, let alone create gringo only enclaves with the full intent to create a white only state in Mexico.
If you object to Zionism, specify what kind and why.
I said it before but I’ll say it again. Why did Zionist Jews have a right to violently invade a people against their consent and expel them from their lands. Why are they owed land/flesh at other’s expense? Why is resistance against this a terminal wrong?
Did you know Israel has anti-miscegenation laws? There are probably others on the planet but Israel is literally the only one I know of that exists in the modern day.
Is it legally possible for a muslim to marry a non-muslim without the partner/offspring converting to Islam? I don't think so:
The thing is though in the end Syria will still be Syria no matter what shitty dictator or not reigns in the future
The Alawite minority in power that ferociously prosecuted the civil war because of fear of being genocide are certainly taking notes I'm sure.
If you think sectarian conflict and genocide don't change a region in a meaningful way, then you're just not zooming in close enough. From an alien's perspective, even the Palestinian conflict are just two different sects of the over-arching Abrahamic religion duking it out, with many members being hard to even visually distinguish from one another, especially since many (most?) Israeli Jews are refugees from the rest of the Middle East.
I welcome all rebuttals, but ideally they address things I actually wrote rather than things you imagine I wrote. I don't know what else I can do except to re-emphasize that I aim to write very transparently, and it's a waste of everyone's time to try and read in between the lines to find out my "true" positions. You are actively encouraged to ask clarifying questions if anything I wrote seems ambiguous. Absent other explanations, I must infer that resorting to this kind of strawmanning stems from a place of frustration — a sign of difficulty in engaging with the points I've clearly laid out.
For example, right out of the gate:
Why? Why do Jews have a right to invade someone else’s land and ethnically cleanse the native populace? Why aren’t jews obligated to live in humanitarian multiculturalism like ever other western nation on the planet, and instead get violent ethnonationalism that inherently can not cohabitate with the non-Jewish natives of the land they are (violently) immigrating to? Why do the Palestinian people not have a right to resist this?
Notice that I said I believe motivations for a Jewish homeland to be sound, and that's distinct from implementations. In the abstract, a Jewish homeland anywhere does not require either invasion or cleansing, but in practice it might be inevitable given the modern geopolitical reality of not having any unclaimed land anywhere. I don't have a good answer for how Zionists could've accomplished their goal completely peacefully, but I also wasn't writing a post about the righteousness of how Israel was founding.
Addressing some of your substantive points:
What value is there in passivity? Look to the West Bank and see what a more passive stance has achieved. Nothing but further expansion of Jewish colonies and a tightening noose around the Palestinians’ neck. That’s pretty damning. I think it’s objective at this point that “just be more peaceful” is an utter failure and an invitation to personal destruction.
This is fair pushback. I responded to a similar argument in this other comment.
No you aren’t [in favor of 100% open borders]. No apologist for Zionism is. It’s logically impossible.
One state solution? Again, like every western nation is expected. An immediate reversal of “settlements” (colonies) would be a start.
There's the practical hurdle, in that Israel prides itself on its democracy but likely only as long as Jews remain a voting majority. It's not likely they'll be willing to take the demographic and political shift that would come with full annexation; the tension between ethnostate and democracy will never go away. Even if we assume this was feasible, I'm not at all convinced that a one-state solution would mollify the fanatical wing of the broader Palestinian cause.
Did you know Israel has anti-miscegenation laws? There are probably others on the planet but Israel is literally the only one I know of that exists in the modern day.
I was confused by this but understand you meant anti-interfaith marriage laws. No, I didn't know that Israel has no mechanism for legally recognizing interfaith marriages conducted within its borders. It doesn't surprise me given its status as an ethnostate and the heavy influence the extreme Zionist wing has over its politics (e.g. Lehava organization advocates for exactly this). Its aversion to interfaith marriages is not significantly different from how the topic is treated in Islam. From my own limited experience, any time a Moroccan was about to marry a kafir, the immediate question was always whether the spouse was going to convert to Islam.
But second that there were checkpoint guards everywhere even in “Palestinian” territory...This is the apartheid.
This is fair, I wasn't as clear as I should have been when addressing the Apartheid issue. The comparison I aimed to draw was to wonder why full annexation by Israel is seen as anathema, from a material standpoint (I already acknowledged Israel's resistance to accepting Palestinians as voting citizens). I could understand the concern if Arab-Israelis had a horrendous quality of life, but they don't. The Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza do endure abject poverty that is made even worse but the intrusive security apparatus and the passively-tolerated spate of settler violence. I concede I should have addressed those circumstances in greater detail, but it would not have materially changed my main point which is the need to critically evaluate the self-professed motivations behind the Palestinian cause, to see which ones hold up with the facts. The problem is genuine valid grievances like the untenable life under occupation get shoved into the same overflowing laundry hamper to provide cover for objective insanity, like suicidal rage over stolen family land someone's grandparents never set foot on.
Lmk if you think there are other points I should address, but please make sure it's in response to something I actually wrote. I welcome all clarifying questions!
magic9mushroom
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ymeskhout 11mo ago·Edited 11mo ago
Wow. This is, I think, the first time that I realised you're not Jewish.
I do not think either side has especially-clean hands. Technically I think you could put me on the "pro-Palestine" side insofar as I think current US policy is too pro-Israel, but my real position is "Israel is strategically a bad ally because it commits the USA to some degree of hostility with the Muslim world (also it sells US technology to the PRC), and it's not remotely innocent or poor enough to deserve military aid on a moral level, so the USA should yank its continual and large military aid to Israel".
It should be noted that despite everything the angry students of the counterculture have accomplished, they have never managed to actually turn off that tap. It really does raise some uncomfortable questions when they can do all sorts of obviously-insane shit elsewhere but on this one issue the counterculture-ascendant can't even stop the USA spending tax dollars in the opposite direction. I'm not with @SecureSignals all the way; not all Jews are Zionists (I'm part Ashkenazi, although not a large part), the rest of the West doesn't do this, and buying one issue is not the same as controlling the entire USG (US policy on patents and copyrights has notoriously been bought out for significant amounts of time by interested companies, including diplomatic efforts to push policy into other countries, although even there it's not quite as consistent as this one). But there's a kernel of truth there; AIPAC, the ADL, and other Zionists really do have a concerning amount of power to control US Near East policy like that, and while of course I'm not in solidarity with "gas the Jews" rhetoric it's not entirely obvious that pointing the Eye of Sauron at US Zionism is a net-negative in utility (to be clear, this is contingent on this not actually turning into real pogroms; SJ is a movement that has rather a hard time stopping at a reasonable place, which is why I'm not making the "net-positive" claim).
magic9mushroom
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ymeskhout 11mo ago·Edited 11mo ago
...how? what?
Your name is obviously not Western or Far Eastern, a lot of Rats are Jewish, and I don't have a good-enough grasp of Jewish or Muslim naming systems to spot the difference by eye (at least without something obvious like an "een" or an "Abu" or an "Ali" or an "al-").
The only major point I think you fail to address, that would make your argument even stronger, is the unique status of Palestinian refugees under UNRWA vs all other refugees under UNHCR. "Palestinian refugee" does not mean what many people assume it means as a result. It's a status you can inherit, and it's a status you can never get rid of except by returning to land currently held by Israel, hence "right of return". You can be the grandchild of a Palestinian who moved to Detroit in 1948, be a full US Citizen, and still count as a Palestinian refugee as far as the UN is concerned.
I think you're making the mistake of seeing the people you immediate know and interact with have dumb tribalist reasons for believing what they believe... and then look at see the majority of that movement is composed of such people with largely the same motivations... And then generalize that to the movement, instead of to ALL movements.
I can guarantee you there's some Clever young Israeli/America Jew writing the exact same thing about how his family members have dumb easily disproven, obviously inconsistent beliefs about Israel's ancient right to Pallestine, their explicit and open racism against arabs (the kind of which they're scream for a Second Sherman's march if a southerner said it about blacks)... And then can look and find Israeli politicians and even think tanks making THE EXACT SAME BULLSHIT arguments... but actually affecting policy with it.
Tribalism, stupidity, and arguments as soldiers is the rule, not the exception.
This is why you find rationalists are almost always the polar opposite of their early intellectual enviroment, because that's the ideology they've seen all the way through.
Israel is inherently destabilizing because it never has to negotiate... in spite of being completely outnumbered and outgunned regionally. Israel can fail to negotiate, get into lighting regional wars... and then they should be fucked from the fact it just started a fight with a vastly larger number of people who could just start ww1 or Iran-War style attritional warfare and bleed them out over a year... But that war never happens because they have America to force and sanction a ceasefire for them.
Its as if a guy had only one or two quic punches in him, went to a bar... and got in fights on the knowledge he had a bigger friend there who will break it up after the first few punches when he'd be screwed.
This is why the peace process goes nowhere because Israel's in a heads i win-tails ReFlip position... that's completely artificial and built on exploiting the US taxpayer and trust of the Iowan Christians who'd die fighting a major middle-east war.
Its an inherently belligerent position. They're Serbian nationalists starting shit in the early 20th century on the Knowledge Russia will declare war to protect them.
Likewise all the analysis of "Methods" is complete bullshit when we're comparing An insurgent terrorist movement to a rogue state that's secretly developed nuclear weapons.
Sure when Israel commits genocide against Palestinian refugees, they give Lebanese Christian Militias a nod and a wink and then protect them as they do it in eyesight of the IDF... they make sure there's no pictures of the IDF using a machete or rifle on a mother and child. Likewise they control the tapes when they sex traffic American girls ot Blackmail US politicians ...
the Idea Jeffery Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell were NOT Mossad agents is the conspiracy theory. Who is this shadowy org that can corrupt and recruit the Daughter of Robert Maxwell right under the Mossad's nose, then stop the Mossad and CIA from acting and opening every file to stop the madness, when Epstein got caught and they realize Ghislaine and Epstein were rogue and SEX TRAFFICKING AMERICAN CHILDREN... Was it the Free Masons? Aliens!? Antarctic Space Nazis?
Its a conspiracy theory to say it wasn't exactly what it looked like, and Israel is the single most traitorous enemy America has ever faced.
EVERY SINGLE THING Hamas has ever done has either had direct precedents in something Israel has done to the Palestinians, or has been vastly more restrained and measured.
If this were 2008 I'd say neither side deserves US backing and funding... But in light of Epstein I believe America should Fund and Arm the moderate Gazan rebels. Exactly one of these groups has attacked American children in America.
Israel is inherently destabilizing because it never has to negotiate
Then why do they not hold the Sinai Peninusla?
Israel can fail to negotiate, get into lighting regional wars... and then they should be fucked from the fact it just started a fight with a vastly larger number of people who could just start ww1 or Iran-War style attritional warfare and bleed them out over a year... But that war never happens because they have America to force and sanction a ceasefire for them.
This is ridiculously ahistorical. The last ceasefires happened with Israel's armies deep into enemy territory and still advancing.
And what would have happened if the US and USSR had not pushed a ceasefire?
How many wars end in 6 days!?
If not for the international alliance system, Israel would win and win and win... for the first few months. Then their forces would reach the limits of what they can hold... and then the reality of being 10 million amidst 500 million Muslims would set in and they'd be ground away to nothing by the reality of attritional artillery warfare and urban insurgency... and they'd be fucked.
Israel has never fought a war like the Iran-Iraq war, or the Russo-Ukraine War, or the World Wars, or even the Chinese or US civil wars, or even Vietnam, Iraq, or the Soviet-Afghanistan. Or even the Rhodesian Bush war, where they have to face an armed organized enemy continuously attacking their military and probably civilians for a decade+.
They've always been able to depend on the international order forcing a ceasefire and locking in their victories... and securing hard blockades on their Palestinian enemies, enforce even by their regional rivals in exchange for US Aid.
Rhodesia certainly didn't have the US bribing Mozambique and Zambia to the tunes of billions of dollars a year to enforce secure borders and block smuggling, the way way Israel does with the US bribing Egypt and Jordan.
That is very unusual. Especially in the 20th century. And it is NOT stable.
The fact that they then decided to Sex Traffick the children of the power they desperately need to backstop 100% of their regional security concerns is the cherry on top.
Israel has never fought a war like the Iran-Iraq war, or the Russo-Ukraine War, or the World Wars, or even the Chinese or US civil wars, or even Vietnam, Iraq, or the Soviet-Afghanistan. Or even the Rhodesian Bush war, where they have to face an armed organized enemy continuously attacking their military and probably civilians for a decade+.
Israel’s main adversaries in previous conventional wars have not demonstrated themselves capable of transitioning to a war of attrition against a competent military.
And what would have happened if the US and USSR had not pushed a ceasefire?
Israel would have been stuck trying to occupy Egypt and Syria. If they'd had any sense they have withdrawn to defensible lines after confiscating or destroying as much enemy material they could get their hands on. It would take those countries considerable time to rebuild.
they'd be ground away to nothing by the reality of attritional artillery warfare and urban insurgency... and they'd be fucked.
As they've proven in their current situation, you can put up with that sort of thing indefinitely.
If you disagree with my criticism of oppression-status granting infinite moral immunity, be specific about what limiting principle you'd propose (if any).
I kind of disagree with this, yes. The limiting factor is having a chance to flourish.
Hypothetical: A guy comes into your house to murder you. He has a gun and spec-ops training; you are a keyboard warrior; he will definitely find you and murder you. The best you can hope for is maybe take him by surprise and give him some bruises. Do you hang out in broad daylight, sheepishly say "guess you caught me" and let yourself be shot? Or do you do the fucker as much damage as you can?
The game theory is this: every decision to exploit somebody exists on a margin spectrum. You are trying to extract as much benefit as possible for a given effort cost; if the other can raise the effort or lower the benefit, it incentivizes you to maybe leave them alone. But we never know where somebody's cut-off point is, so there's always an incentive, if you notice you're being fucked over, to do as much damage as you can back.
So there's a very tentative hypothetical we can construct here to advocate for Palestinean terrorism. Israel is clearly fucking them while exploiting "their" land (whether your game theory implementation advocates forgiveness or revenge here probably depends on preexisting sentiment, but revenge is at least plausible), Israel is clearly trying to minimize effort costs with Gaza, maybe if you can impose some costs on Israel, it'll push them closer to the threshold or at any rate strengthen your negotiating position. In game theory, a person who never plays 'defect' isn't an agent but a resource. Hamas chose the most damaging strategy available to them. Did it break existing compacts? Sure, but I'd presume they assumed that they could not get fucked any worse than they were. Will it work? Probably no.
Okay, cynic hat on: no, but the cost of it not working will not fall on Hamas. IMO, Israel can't really do anything (not hugely expensive) here that will hurt Hamas more than it drives recruitment. From the cynical view, Hamas and the authoritarian movement in Israel are obviously just playing Toxoplasma Tennis. B attacks A'. This enrages A! A cannot fight B, so it attacks B'. This enrages B! B also cannot (cheaply) fight A, so it attacks A', and so on. Part of the reason I don't really have a strong moral view against Hamas is that if this is an accurate model, it's obviously "cooperative" to some extent. Hamas benefits Netanyahu, and conversely. And whenever a cycle like that exists, blaming the most recent hit on whoever committed it is looking at the wrong component. It's a systemic effect. Remove Hamas, another terror group will be found. There is a gap here that allows the existence of a feedback cycle, so a feedback cycle arises. Anyway, in this particular case, the cycle might be running out of control because somebody, A or B, underestimated the damage the current serve would do, so it's unclear what happens next. But my moral view to "let's put the angry people in a cage and then send the guard away" is: a stupid game was played, and a stupid prize was won, I feel bad for the victims but not angry at the perpetrators; it's not like they were the load-bearing causal component.
To loop back: why did I say "the limiting factor is having a chance to flourish?" Well, how do you get out of a cycle like this? You find better things to do with your life. Not sure how good a life you could have in Gaza City. If you could have a good life, a dignified life, a life with authorship and respect, and then you go on a revenge bender - well, I am a humanist, I want to maximize flourishing. When people live an unworthy life, I welcome attempts to, even counterfactually, push for a better life; when people could already live a worthy life, I don't. Do I think Gazans lack the capability to live a worthwhile life? I don't know, honestly, but if I wanted to construct a moral case for terrorism, that's where I'd start.
Addendum: When this conflict started, I said to a family member: "I don't think what Hamas did was right, but I am willing to bet on two things: at the end of this, a lot more Palestineans will have died than Israelis; and at the end of this, Hamas will still be there." If Israel wants to convince me that I'm wrong about the Toxoplasma Tennis thing, those are the two factors they should try to improve.
I concede you present a valid justification of orthogonal violence. There are indeed scenarios where effective resistance is impossible, and the only tools available involving making enemy action as painful as possible, third parties be damned.
Even with these concessions, we can still objectively evaluate the legitimacy of this genre of resistance. In your spec-ops assassin hypothetical, the legitimacy of your orthogonal resistance will depend in part to the legitimacy for why the assassin is even after you. Is it because he's dispatched by a tyrannical government intent on silencing your criticism of it? Then yeah, legit resistance, good luck doing whatever you can. But is it because you murdered the assassin's entire family years ago? Well, good riddance to you.
I think pre-committing to orthogonal violence is sometimes rational. Response nuclear strikes in mutually assured destruction are purely orthogonal violence: you destroyed our cities, therefore we destroy your cities. The point is not that the decision is reasonable once the nukes are approaching you, but that being a country which responds tit-for-tat will make it less likely that you are nuked in the first place. Just have enough Petrovs to avoid any false-positives.
Ideally, such orthogonal violence remains counterfactual.
I also agree that there are circumstances where the best you can do is to scratch the enemy with whatever resources you've got. My go to example is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. If the enemies plan is to send your family to Auschwitz, it is entirely permissible to turn your family into weapons which are supposed to hurt the enemy in the process. Under such circumstances, I would be okay with turning children into suicide bombers if they would otherwise be killed in the gas chambers.
The big difference between the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Gazans is that the latter group do not face a genocide. Most of the hardships of the Gazans is a consequence of decisions of their leadership. If you find yourself being an inmate in an asylum, it might strike you as a good idea to attack the orderlies, giving them a black eye in the process. Unfortunately, this will end up with you in a straight jacket, which will lower your quality of life a lot more than the black eye you gave the orderly. If you then proceed to kick, bite and headbutt, the main thing which will change is that you will have more and more constraints. This is the situation Gaza finds itself in. (Of course, this metaphor glosses over the differences in interest between the Gazans and Hamas. Hamas has every interest in turning Gaza into hell on earth, because flourishing people make bad Jihadists.)
orthoxerox
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ymeskhout 11mo ago
But set all that aside for now and just assume that Arab/Jewish disparities are strictly the result of incessant discrimination. It's true that Arab-Israelis earn about 60% as much income as Jewish-Israeli households, yet this roughly translates into an average daily wage of $50 for Arab-Israelis compared to $32 in the West Bank, and $13 in Gaza. I don't know how directly comparable the ratios are to individual income, but as a rough metric Israel's $54k GDP per capita is more than ten times what is available in neighboring Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. By any material measure, Arab-Israelis fare much better under Israeli governance than under any neighboring Arab governance.
African-Americans in the 50's and 60's fared much better under American governance that under any African governance. They still demanded equal rights with the Whites and, while they supported decolonization, weren't that eager to move to the newly independent African countries or even to Liberia.
If you disagree with my criticism of oppression-status granting infinite moral immunity, be specific about what limiting principle you'd propose
Suppose someone is unjustly jailed and destined for execution. He's exhausted all legal avenues for reprieve. He discovers a way to escape, but it means murdering his jailors, who are innocent blokes just trying to make a living. So he performs his plan, leading to suffering of both his victims and their families. Is he worthy of condemnation? My gut instinct says pretty clearly no.
The key limiting principle is about effectiveness: he's got a plausible, concrete plan of action that can lead to his goal. Murdering one of his jailors just to make a point would be reprehensible. The issue with both Hamas and Israel is that neither of them seem to have a concrete plan for their suffering-creating acts to lead to their desired goals. Razing Gaza to the ground is only marginally more likely to get Israel increased long term security for its citizens than murdering folks at a music festival is going to get Hamas a state from river to sea.
It sucks for Israel, because its goals are more reasonable than those of Hamas (even granting those their most generous interpretation). But sometimes you're just stuck with an unfortunate hand: if a country deals with tornadoes that kill hundreds of people every year, it sucks, but it doesn't mean you should drop bombs on your neighbor, because those bombs aren't going to do anything to make the tornadoes go away.
Suppose someone is unjustly jailed and destined for execution. He's exhausted all legal avenues for reprieve. He discovers a way to escape, but it means murdering his jailors, who are innocent blokes just trying to make a living. So he performs his plan, leading to suffering of both his victims and their families. Is he worthy of condemnation? My gut instinct says pretty clearly no.
This is not a good analogy because Hamas members aren't unjustly jailed and Hamas directed it's attacks at random civilians, not prospective jailers. Nor did they need to kill civilians as part of their escape. And even if you're using jailers in the loose sense of people who are responsible for infringing on the liberties of Gazans, so politicians, police, military, maybe some bueraucrats and civil servants (which still doesn't fit who Hamas attacked), then there's all sorts of wider implications for where else you'd find similar attacks to be acceptable. The elephant in the room is the mass false imprisonments associated with lockdowns, but there are plenty of other causes you could find where some individual group was plausibly unjustly prosecuted and now supposedly have justification to murder 1,000+ civilians?
To put it another way, this justification for Hamas's actions would apply far better to actions that are far more universally condemned.
It's consistent: if it isn't clear, I think both Israel and Hamas are the prisoners who murder an innocent guard for no reason, just to make a point, which is reprehensible.
That said, it's a bullet I'm willing to bite: if either Hamas or Israel had a solution that killed thousands of innocents that actually managed to solve their problems, I'd consider it morally acceptable. (That said, I'm rooting for Israel's vision for the region over Hamas's, but I classify that as an aesthetic preference, not a moral one.)
The tornados that I'm familiar with do not have moral agency, and that is one of the many differences between them and humans. Is there a particular reason to suggest that Palestinians do not have moral agency?
Agency is only relevant to the extent it gives you additional levers to achieve your goals: if you can create some incentive structure among your enemies to result in better outcomes for you, then of course you should.
Does it seem likely that Palestinians will respond in a way amendable to Israel to a more militarized incentive structure?
I don't think there is a plausible strategy that Israel could pursue that would result in a friendly response from the Palestinians.
However, given a sufficiently militarized incentive structure, one might be able to proceed from "negative response" to "no response." If the Palestinians are moral agents, this incentive structure could be described as the just deserts of their previous actions.
I agree that Israel is stuck with an unfortunate hand; I do not agree that they are left without effective strategies.
I don't want to pull a Kendi here and claim the only explanation for disparate outcomes is discrimination, because it very well could be a 'pipeline problem' that stems from the aforementioned disparities in public services, or perhaps differences much more inherent.
It’s HBD. It’s literally HBD, plus maybe some culture stuff.
The vast majority of Israeli Arabs are Muslims, but the small number who are Christian compete with Israeli Jews just fine in terms of outcomes.
...because it very well could be a 'pipeline problem' that stems from the aforementioned disparities in public services, or perhaps differences much more inherent.
Why cut off that last part to make the same point as me?
There are two important omissions and inaccuracies IMO:
You ignore the DNA evidence that Palestinians are the direct ancestors of ancient Canaanite and Levantine inhabitants of the land, and doubly ignore that Ashkenazim — the chief instigators of Zionism — are half-European in DNA. The crucial question of who the original inhabitants are is swept aside with a misleading, “the area was already inhabited by Arab Muslims by the start of early Zionist migration [who were the] last in the very long list of adverse possession feuds”. But Palestinians are Arabized more than Arab. They took on the dominant Arab culture and language, and intermixed with Arabs, but this in no way denies their claim to original occupancy. If I leave Ireland for Germany and marry a German girl, and meanwhile the Irish who stayed in Ireland changed their language and creed and adopted some Arab immigrants, I would be (reasonably) laughed at if I arrived by boat and demanded claim to half the land as an original inhabitant.
You claim that you could never “support any movement, no matter how righteous its cause might be, that employs sadistically orthogonal violence”. Yet this is precisely how the early Zionists obtained as much land as they did. A chunk of it was purchased through less sadistic means, yes, by concealing their intent to ethnically cleanse the land and only hire Jewish workers. But for much of the land they inflicted terror on the British to pressure them into favorable terms, and terrorized the Palestinians to force them into fleeing. 1, 2, 3. This is important to dwell on: how would Israel behave if their bloodshed couldn’t be excused by targeting Hamas leaders? 40% of their missile strike casualties so far have killed under-18s, right? (The Haaretz figure on the original Hamas incursion, half-complete, is that Hamas killed just 20 under-18s). If Israel lacked a powerful state — if they were in the shoes of the Palestinians — would they engage in sadistic orthogonal violence? History says yes. That’s how they were founded. And they also hid under civilian cover, at one point requiring the British to institute a curfew of 200,000 Jews.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but it seems that your fundamental premise is that DNA lineage should be the only/primary way for a people to establish a claim of "original occupancy". It's not like tracing ancestral claims to land is some sort of exact science, but sure if you were intent on that mission DNA evidence could certainly be a strong factor to consider. Not everyone will agree on which factors to prioritize.
First, I don't know what discriminatory labor practices have to do with orthogonal violence. I'm assuming arguendo your descriptions about Zionist violence are accurate, and the standards I outlined for assessing a movement's utilization of violence would be a matter of degree. Any war is bound to have some war crimes, and hypothetically one soldier intentionally killing a civilian would not be enough to tar an entire war effort. For me to disavow a movement for using orthogonal violence, it would depend on how significant this tactic in proportion to their overall violence. I think Hamas tactics are off-the-charts horrendous. If it turns out that the Zionist militias relied significantly on terrorism on civilian population to achieve their goals, then sure I don't have a problem disavowing their movement as not worth it (I'm not even claiming that it was worth it).
If it turns out that the Zionist militias relied significantly on terrorism on civilian population to achieve their goals, then sure I don't have a problem disavowing their movement as not worth it
I never heard of this before. They get points that the objective (destroying incriminating information) was directly related to their overall mission, and some points if their claims about the warning are true. The intent here does not seem orthogonal, and if the warnings are to believed then it was somewhat proportional. Falsifying my position would be either if they tried to destroy the documents by flattening the entire hotel, or if their objective was maximizing civilian casualties. Then it would be a matter of assessing the whole movement to see what the typical tactic was. I really have no current opinion on whether the Jewish insurgency was "worth it" or not now, but that's how I would generally go about it if I was trying to answer it.
Had you heard of the Irgun generally, or read about their other actions prior to the founding of Israel? Have you heard about how the soon-to-be Israelis purged Palestinian villages, systematically bombed homes, raped and murdered indiscriminately, and broadcast their atrocities and their threats of worse to come in an attempt to induce the surrounding natives to flee?
Had you heard of Sabra and Shatila, presided over and actively facilitated by an IDF commander who went on to be elected Prime Minister of Israel?
Are you familiar with the settlers generally, how they're armed, how they operate, the sort of abuse and random violence and murder they've spent decades inflicting on their Palestinian neighbors, including women and children, with the tacit and occasionally explicit cooperation of the Israeli government?
Are you familiar with the concept of a "price tag attack"? What's your estimate of the efficacy of Israeli law-enforcement against the perpetrators of such attacks?
Are you familiar with the long, long history of incidentslike this one? I recall you being somewhat off-put by the results of police procedure in the case of George Floyd; How would you compare those to a policy whereby a 13-year-old girl with a backpack can not only be shot on sight while running away, but can be finished off by point-blank rifle fire, the officer who pulled the trigger can be caught lying about the details of the incident, be charged only with minor offenses, and then be acquitted on all charges by the courts? Have you read enough about the general policies and actions of the Israeli security forces to get a feel for whether this sort of behavior and legal outcomes are representative, or just Chinese cardiologists?
Are you familiar with the history of Israeli involvement in the incubation of Hamas itself, in a bid to play divide-and-conquer against the PLO?
The above is by no means exhaustive. You and a great many others here seem to be operating under the assumption that the story requires there to be a good guy. It does not. Both sides can in fact be completely awful, even if one side is relatively rich and sophisticated and produces fancy microchips and CS papers and has lots of influential supporters. Nor is there any requirement that there be a reasonable solution to the situation. It is, in fact, entirely possible to create a situation where the only sane option remaining is to leave, and those who choose to stay deserve what they get.
I do not care what the Palestinians do to the Israelis, and I do not care what the Israelis do to the Palestinians. I am thankful that I live nowhere near either of them, and wish to have as little as possible to do with either of them. It seems to me that they are best considered a cautionary example, not a problem with a solution. Observe from a distance, and learn from their miseries.
[EDIT] ...If the above comes across as hostile, I apologize. If you managed to get this far in life knowing nothing of significance about the Israel/Palestine conflict, I envy you, and encourage you to attempt to maintain your streak.
Sorry for the late reply! No, I have not heard of many of the examples you cite when I wrote my post.
I agree that expanding upon many subjects you mention ("price tag attacks", lack of scrutiny over how the IDF operates, etc.) would have been useful additional context. While I didn't set out to write a comprehensive history with infinite word count, I never intended to gloss over Israel's actions here. I did mention how the IDF lied about its culpability in the Qana massacre, and did mention the extreme Zionists responsible for vigilante retributive violence.
I did not believe that a history of Irgun or Israel's involvement in creating Hamas was all that relevant. I generally am quite dismissive about how relevant sins from however many decades ago should be, regardless of how well documented they are. I'm not claiming you're making this argument, but I'm reminded of the attempts to tar the United States as indelibly tainted because of its original sin of slavery from 1619. A denunciation of slavery's ills in the past does not require a blanket denunciation of America today.
I'm not trying to wriggle out of the standards I outlined and I encourage you to call me out if you think otherwise. When I offered the scenario of Zionist militias relying on terrorism to achieve their goals, I can still denounce their movement at the time as not worth it. But it would be odd for me to denounce Israel's current existence because of events from 75 years ago. Especially since there's more than enough current behavior to denounce.
I completely agree that nothing requires there to be a "good guy" here, and that both sides indeed can be awful. That said, the reason I included "...if I had to pick" was to avoid a common trap within political discourse that essentially boils down to "we can easily solve this problem if everyone just starts behaving rationally". I also wanted to avoid the nihilism that comes along with concluding that "everyone is equally bad". Even if you "pick" Israel as I do, there's nothing preventing anyone from sharply criticizing any of its policies or actions. Remember that it's a comparative ranking, not an absolute one.
I personally find that actions' relevancy degrades sharply in proportion to their age. I addressed the historical events because 1) that's what people claim is relevant and 2) to argue against their relevance. So Hamas did indeed commit some horrendous shit 20 years ago during the second intifada, which illustrates what motivates it. But much more relevant is using the second intifada to explore whether they are motivated by the same ideology (they are) or interested in changing their behavior (they aren't) today. If Hamas had somehow successfully turned Gaza into Singapore-on-the-Mediterranean in recent years, I'm not going to care as much about what the organization did in the past.
Had you heard of "the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah, and the nation of Israel" by shooting up a crowded mosque with an assault rifle, killing 29 and wounding 125, whose grave was subsequently made into a shrine by his fellow settlers?
From your own link:
The international community and the Israeli government condemned the massacre. Israel arrested followers of Meir Kahane, criminalized the Kach movement and affiliated movements as terrorist, forbidding certain Israeli settlers to enter Palestinian towns, and demanding that those settlers turn in their army-issued rifles
But refuting every claim you posted would take too much time and effort--that's how a Gish gallop works.
Such vandalism also embraces damaging the property, or injuring members of the Israel Police and the Israel Defense Forces....
The "price tag" concept and violence have been publicly rejected by Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,[21][22] who have demanded that those responsible be brought to justice.
The settler leadership have "fiercely condemned" the price tag policy,[27] and the vast majority of Yesha rabbis have expressed their reservations about it.[28] According to Shin Bet, the vast majority of the settlers also reject such actions.
estimates of the extent of the perpetrator group vary: one figure calculates that from several hundred to about 3,000 people implement the price tag policy,[15] while a recent analysis sets the figure at a few dozen individuals, organized in small close-knit and well-organised cells[16] and backed by a few hundred right-wing activists.
It is not. The OP decided to get informed about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict immediately after one of the worst things the Palestinians have ever done, and expressed bewilderment at why some people have limited sympathy for the Israelis. I'm sketching out the part of the picture he's missing: The Israelis, as a matter of fact, have done some extremely awful things themselves.
The casualties seem to belie both the idea that it was narrowly targeted and the idea that there was a warning placed. 91 dead, mostly civilians unrelated to the military occupation, does not equate to a narrowly targeted action. Especially when the target was documents, rather than men or materiel. They blew up a hotel, not a barracks, to target a civilian admin office, not a military command post.
King David had a non-terror objective, if a stupid one, and (allegedly) tried to minimize deaths by calling ahead multiple times -- there's a mix of conspiracy theories about who didn't forward what messages. Which is still bad, but if you want really atrocious early Zionist efforts, the Irgun bombings targeting markets as explicitly retribution and random on Arabs are very worth being aware of and absolutely beyond the pale (see here for a fuller list, though it does mix both terror attacks and pseudomilitary ones).
Most of these ranged from merely non-productive to hilariously counterproductive, and Irgun's claim to pioneer pre-attack warnings was both wildly self-serving and sometimes just a lie. I don't think you can honestly claim that they caused Arab unwillingness to recognize Jewish peoples -- the 1920 immediate reaction to the Balfour declaration and Faisal-Weizmann say a lot, despite predating almost all of the violent riots and having little to no detail about what or wear -- but even contemporaneously Irgun (and Lehi) were well-recognized as having cemented and legitimized that response, for very little gain.
More recently, you have the Duma arson and Abu Khdeir torture-murder, or (while not successful) a number of attempted or encouraged attacks on Peace Now activists (aka other Israelis, sometimes Jewish ones). Those resulting in fatalities usually result in conviction and serious sentencing by Israeli justice systems, but non-fatal incidents pretty regularly result in No Suspects Being Found.
King David had a non-terror objective, if a stupid one
Wikipedia has a few different cites saying that at least one of the goals was to destroy paperwork linking the Jewish Agency to attacks, but even if you're skeptical of that, somewhere between half to two-thirds of the hotel had been used for the British Mandate's administration, which was heavily disrupted by the bombing. Clearly not worth the moral sin (or negative publicity), but very separate from the purpose of changing policy by violence (which they did use elsewhere) or violence for its own sake/'revenge' (ditto).
Those resulting in fatalities usually result in conviction and serious sentencing by Israeli justice systems
Well, of the two I linked... for the Duma arson, Amiram Ben-Uliel was found guilty of the Duma arson and sentenced to life imprisonment, though the minor who assisted in planned only got a short sentence (~10 months plus what had been served during the trial). For Abu Khdeir, Yosef Haim Ben-David got a life sentence-plus, one of the unnamed minors got life(ish) and the other 21 years (... probably will end up closer to ten).
((This complaint about too-short sentences isn't specifically tied to the Israel-Palestine stuff; see Schlissel. But obviously there's both more options and more harm in the context of the West Bank.))
There have been failures to convict (or even try or find) some Israeli civilian murderers of clear homicide, and the environment there makes claims to self-defense extremely difficult to treat fairly, so there's a reason I say usually. And the rules of engagement for the IDF specifically are a very bad joke. But there's a lot of summaries of settler violence that try to give the impression that it's a no-bag-limit hunt, and the presence of any convictions makes that hard to support.
You ignore the DNA evidence that Palestinians are the direct ancestors of ancient Canaanite and Levantine inhabitants of the land, and doubly ignore that Ashkenazim — the chief instigators of Zionism — are half-European in DNA.
How are Ashkenazim "the chief instigators of Zionism"? Mizrahi Jews in Israel make up over 60% of the nation's Jewish population, and their politics are to the right relative to the country.
Because the word instigate means to initiate, or cause to occur, or to begin urging some action. Zionism, as a modern era push to create a Jewish state, began with Ashkenazi Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Zionism
You're right, I didn't understand what the word "instigate" meant. I thought you claimed that Ashkenazi Jews are the chief supporters / proponents of Zionism in modern Israel - but that was not your claim.
I specifically wrote that it is half-complete. It is possible that more under-18s will come out in the full list, but 40 is also the widely distributed number of children killed.
The Haaretz paper has every name and age of half the killed… which I linked and specified. So your original point wasn’t very relevant, though I grant the unlikely possibility they are holding back on the children’s’ names. If you look at the number provided, it’s half the total of the dead. Here’s someone doing an age breakdown: https://twitter.com/lqgist/status/1717623479225241672
The only number we have ever gotten on children killed is 40, which came from the original reporting, and was briefly (and falsely) amalgamated with a story of beheaded babies: here’s a link. Israel has been opaque on total numbers.
Anyway, I stand by my original sentence as being adequately sourced and qualified:
The Haaretz figure on the original Hamas incursion, half-complete, is that Hamas killed just 20 under-18s
... your defense, when someone points out that the first and only number you provided in this context is wildly inappropriate as a value, is to point to a higher count, which is over three weeks old, and which is no more clearly a complete total.
and appears to be up to 1097 names out of "over 1300" -- so a pretty big sample now. Not sure whether any of the deboonkers have updated their figures, and I'm sure not going through all those names -- but scrolling over it a lot of them do seem to have military ranks next to there names.
Which does not preclude many of them being civilians no longer on active duty, but would be weird if there were many babies like that.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Reuters Reports:
The AP has a similar statement.
In case you're thinking that 'My staff reporters were not involved in planning or executing a mass murder of civilians' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt", you're not alone. The HonestReporting summary if anything manages to undersell it, which is quite an accomplishment for a news story that involves the phrase 'lynch mob': people have since found on a photographer's facebook page a video of the man on a motorbike where the camera-holder or one of the other riders waves a grenade in-hand.
Journalistic ethics are a hard problem, and a harder one during wartime. It's typical for wartime embeds with conventional military forces to submit to often-onerous restrictions, sometimes to the point of requiring all releases to undergo pre-publication review (which should raise a number of Constitutional questions in the United States but mostly doesn't). There was a pretty major controversy in the mid-2000s after a Paris Match reporting team was on-scene at a missile strike targeting a mail carrier aircraft (Vernier-Palliez claimed that the militants had "set them up" and had no idea that they were going to commit a violent attack... though I think her claimed surprise is more than a little self-serving). And 'journalism' that's really just repackaged press releases from active members of a particular side are common enough outside of combat; the rewards are, if anything, simply greater for politics-by-other-means.
On the other hand, if your war reporting is little more than repackaged press releases from a group that slaughtered and raped civilians, while the reporting papers over all of that, this raises more than a few questions for that reporting's accuracy, as critics of journalists embedded with the IDF have long held. And that doesn't seem to be sinking in, here:
That'd be the guy with the grenade and cheerful embrace from Hamas leadership; CNN remains certain, among other things, that this summary is tots accurate and that the photographer's ties to Hamas' military arm tots don't leave any room for suspicion. Mahmud's main remaining photos on the AP database have at least been corrected to note that the dead 'Israeli soldier' was in fact a pacifist Israeli-German dual-citizen.
Okay, but these people weren't exactly weekly bylines. Indeed, they're just one of countless on-the-ground randos that various press agencies sent money and lent legitimacy. They're also just the ones dumb enough and unlucky enough to get caught, but let's leave that aside for now. One bit of that legitimacy is people believing the repackaged press releases, but a deeper one is the ability to wear and mark press credentials, a matter that has historically been considered worth protecting. There's even been clear cases where the IDF has wrongly killed journalists, and been criticized at length for it.
That just became far more difficult to maintain as a norm.
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IDF making a lot of progress with minimal casualties https://x.com/yossi_melman/status/1721779627251695752?s=20
(likely conservative estimate) map of IDF presence / progress: https://x.com/War_Mapper/status/1721646940780191941?s=20
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Why don’t militaries support tanks with infantry?
It seems like common sense but we’ve now both in the Ukraine War, Armenian-Azerbaijan War and now in Israel, militaries seem to be convinced that tanks are fine by themselves and as a result are sitting ducks for infantry with anti-tanks weapons.
What’s going on? Why do militaries make such a dumb mistake again and again? Is there something I’m missing?
Israeli tanks have APS like Trophy that in theory mitigates a lot of the risk from RPGs.
Their vehicles are also designed to ensure crew safety above all else, even after a disabling hit.
Combining this with their low appetite for loss of human life, it might make sense to minimize the inevitable infantry casualties from dismounts accompanying vehicles by sending them in solo. Might, I have no specific insight into the outcomes of their doctrine, but for all the footage Hamas releases of close quarters RPG hits on such vehicles, footage of the burning wreckage in the aftermath seems lacking.
At the end of the day, there's no good way of clearing an urban hellhole, short of nuking it.
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Because infantry can't run this fast and mechanized infantry is vulnerable to the same anti-tank weapons. Combined arms are hard. Even the US will struggle if you take away its CAS and artillery support.
You need to send your infantry forward so they can take out anti-tank weapons, but your tanks must be close enough behind that they can take out anti-infantry weapons that your infantry will encounter. Or your infantry has to have artillery support on call, which is vulnerable to counter-battery fire.
I'm talking about regular land warfare, sending tanks into cities that haven't been completely levelled is just wasting them.
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How many Jews feel like this now? Glad you all are feeling how I’ve felt for a few years that your just an ethnic white now and hopefully we can ally. Eisman from the Big Short (funny how Jews pop up in any event) says all his family went to UPenn and UPenn is dead to them now.
I said a week or two ago if the Jews picked some random school like Eastern Kentucky it would be a top 5-10 school in a generation.
https://twitter.com/sfmcguire79/status/1720428030168895506?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Snide asides like this add only heat. Please don't.
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I always thought it was ultra cringe to have these rando finance guys’ names plastered over everything in academia, which should be above that. Hopefully schools learn their lesson and stop bothering with these clowns.
Nice platitude but those clowns are the hand that feeds them.
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Nothing is more Lindy then universities.
The list of top universities in 1960 is substantially the same as it is today.
Lots of places have tried to improve their rankings but it doesn't seem to work. Back in ancient times, I'm pretty sure Nebraska or some random school offered me a full ride based on my PSAT score. This strategy to recruit high-IQ students clearly didn't move the needle for them.
It’s because HYPS and the tier below schools always make sure to take the absolute best even as they also make sure to take donors’/board members’ kids and the requisite diversity intake.
So if normally the top 0.3% of graduating high schoolers would go to that tier of college under a purely meritocratic system, now only the top 0.1% go (math and physics olympiad winners etc) and so do those other groups. But because IQ has a very long tail, skimming off only the top 0.1% instead of 0.3% still means they get most of the best people - even if the system isn’t ‘fair’.
IQ is fit to a normal distribution
I wrote something retarded but meant to say tail effects.
It's not tail effects either.
I know what you are trying to say, there's just no phrase for it.
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That would work if their product was education. I don't think a Harvard education is worth 200K more than free education. Now the signaling value (even if you get fired from every job you subsequently get for incompetence) and "I went to Harvard" card that you have for the rest of your life, 200K is probably a deal for that.
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So he's angry that a certain number of protestors held up signs stating, "Free Palestine from the river to the sea," and now he wants to take his ball and go home?
Okay.
Seriously, what do people like him expect? “Oh the name on this scholarship sounds kinda Jewish, I love Israel now.”
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I'm not a moderator, but please don't.
Well I made the comment on purpose. Because Jews really do pop up everywhere despite their small numbers. I do it because they are an important people who contribute to civilization.
Using statistically accurate language would be clearer for the audience of The Motte.
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what school is the Eisman clan going to, now?
Are they having enough kids, and willing to spend enough money, that their influence can be applied to another school?
Why isn't yeshiva university considered a top school then, when it's mostly Jewish? Is it because they get the third tier, orthodox Jews, and not the first tier IQ ashkanazi secular Jews?
Prestige comes from rankings ie research ie faculty. In many STEM (and other) fields top departments are already substantially Jewish. Jewish parents sending their kids to Yeshiva University instead of Harvard won’t affect rankings, if any YU grad wants to go into academia at the top level they’ll go to Princeton or MIT or whatever for postgrad (if they can), and then if they’re good they’ll stay or move to a similar university. Very few YU grads go into academia.
For Jewish schools to poach the best Jewish faculty from the Ivies you’d need an overt, explicit purge of Jewish faculty from Harvard etc which just isn’t likely.
so you are saying if some jews go to yeshiva it doesn’t change rankings?
so to make eastern kentucky uni the best, it requires ALL the best jews and jewish faculty to go there?
YU is the equivalent of the Jewish state school, and it is far better than the meadian state school.
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Is your debate partner an underdog fetishist?
Someone here (or maybe on /r/themotte) opened my eyes to this idea. I'm sorry I can't find the post and credit you, various searches aren't helping me find it.
There exists an apparent mini-moral philosophy of always siding with the underdog. On the surface this has good feels: always side with the weak against the strong. In every conflict, between individuals or between nations, find out who the strong one is, and find out who the weak one is. The weak one is the one you should side with.
This is not as ironclad a moral imperative as it appears on the tin. The most extreme and simple form of the imperative's flaw is such:
Suppose Mr Rogers and some random homeless guy get into a fight.
These are the facts and they are not disputed: the homeless guy demanded Mr Rogers’ wallet and he said no. So, the homeless guy attacked him. Shocking everyone, Mr Rogers fights back ferociously, sending the homeless guy to the hospital. Mr Rogers escapes without a scratch.
Digging into the homeless guy's background reveals that he has been in and out of prison a lot. For theft and minor violent offenses, except he was most recently imprisoned for pushing random bystanders off of train platforms onto train tracks. He had been arrested before anyone died. The homeless guy was released from prison a few days before he got into a fight with Mr Rogers.
Mr Rogers is a saintly widely beloved media personality with a legendary benevolence towards all.
So. Should someone here be penalized?
An underdog fetishist might say yes, Mr Rogers should be penalized because he’s actually a member of an elite class whereas the deranged homeless guy is a member of an underclass. This is a perfect example of class struggle.
In my experience, most people consider the Palestinians the underdog here, but not everyone. Some consider Israel the underdog being propped up by the US.
Anyway, while I consider it morally confused, I contend people who would condemn Mr Rogers exist, and that if you're going to spend time debating an extremely nuanced complex situation like the Israeli/Palestine conflict with others, it's valuable to at least first figure out if your debate partner would always (e.g.) side with the homeless guy against Mr Rogers.
I mean, isn't this a.k.a "Intersectionalism?" This is the foundation of contemporary progressive thought: the weakest party in a power imbalance is the one who must be favored in that conflict. Being "Woke" is seeing the world as that series of power imbalances, and "Identity Politics" is being aware of one's own membership in one or more disempowered groups.
It's also the cornerstone of dramatic fiction, which is why IMO mass media is so confluent with progressive ideas and has become their most powerful delivery system.
It's also why "Woke" are terrified of what they call the alt-right: because the alt-right work exactly the same way, but have an alternative (and possibly more correct) view of who is more disempowered. Which, ironically, makes the Woke a conservative [privilege-safeguarding] movement and the alt-right a progressive [privilege-shuffling] one.
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I think that in many fictional narratives, the correlation between being the good guy and being the underdog is high. "David kills Goliath" is a story, "David becomes the 35th person to be killed by Goliath" is not. Hence Frodo vs Sauron, Harry vs Voldemort, Asterix vs the Romans. Of course, in reality, the correlation between good guy and underdog is, to the first approximation, zero.
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Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope--are we talking about Israel vs. Hamas, Israel vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world that funds them, or Israel + its supporters in the US vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world? The homeless guy vs. Mr. Rogers scenario doesn't quite capture the dynamic of group vs. group when each side has debateable membership.
That said, I don't favor underdog analysis as a particularly useful lens, though clearly others disagree.
That's one of the interesting things about power... local power can be a massively different beast than total power, or even future local power.
"My garden may be smaller than your Rome, but my pilum is harder than your sternum", and all that.
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To me, this is one of the key issues of the whole thing which makes it just a non-starter. The degrees of freedom there are in determining who is the underdog and who isn't is effectively infinite, because human capability of self-deception is effectively infinite. So if one takes on the framework of the "righteousness of the underdog," then step 1.00001 that follows immediately after this is to deem [whoever I like] as the underdog, while twisting logic in any way required to reach that conclusion. By the time we reach step 2, step 1.00001 is long forgotten, and any scrutiny about that step is shut down as picking on the underdog who has been Firmly and Uncontroversially Determined to be the Underdog in this situation. It's just naked bias and favoritism with a particularly flattering narrative that makes it easier for people to believe even when they like to think of themselves as disliking naked bias and favoritism.
This is why when I hear "punching up" and "punching down" in the context of comedy or satire or the like, I always translate "up" to "direction I want punches to be thrown" and "down" to "direction I don't want punches to be thrown;" in practice, that's what they mean and only what they mean.
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Maybe you debate people more aligned with you than I do; there are legit people who condemn Mr Rogers in this, what I consider, pathologically slanted absurd example and I often wish I had known that way ahead of time.
To me that reveals a kind of moral confusion that makes the finer scope points a more first world issue.
Yeah, that's a fair point. If someone's seriously taking the side of the homeless guy in your example, I don't know what I'd do with that information other than backing away slowly.
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This seems like a similar observation to Arnold Kling's three languages of politics framework. He states this as progressives thinking in terms of oppressor-oppressed dynamics, conservatives thinking about civilization-barbarism, and libertarians thinking about freedom-authoritarianism. There are obviously times where these overlap, but other times it results in people talking right past each other. I think you can see this starkly, at least for conservatives and progressives, when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Without regard to finalized policy prescriptions, the basic sympathies of progressives seem to always lie with Palestinans, who they see as oppressed, while conservatives side with Israel because it's the civilized side. Often, the language used by liberals and conservatives even puts it explicitly in those terms.
"Civilization-barbarism" is a terrible lens for international conflict, you can easily whip up people into a frenzy with atrocity propaganda - bayoneted nuns or babies taken from incubators.
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Freddie deBoer confuses me on this point, because he was once writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict and stated “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg.”
But he has also argued repeatedly that "punching up" and "punching down" is a meaningless framework through which to look at humour, interpersonal relationships or anything else.
When I read this, I think to myself, "yeah, this is why I hate Marxists". Openly admitting that it doesn't even matter who is right, they'll just always side with whoever they think is weaker is a recipe for the dissolution of civilization.
Agreed.
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Leaked Document from Internal Israeli Government Think Tank lays out a plan to remove the entire population of Gaza to the Sinai peninsula as the final aim of the war. Hebrew Source here which I can't vouch for beyond google translate. Full document here
This is a big step and I'm surprised I've only seen it retweeted once by Adam Tooze and nowhere else. I'm sure it's big on the Arabic internet, but I'm not plugged in to Muslim conspriacy theories. Obviously ideas like this have been mooted around theMotte and everywhere else, but for it come from the Israeli government is new. Thoughts:
-- For this to be planned doesn't mean it is really going to happen. I'm sure somewhere in the Pentagon there are plans put together, if only as exercises, for invading Canada, Mexico, and Jamaica. This could all mean nothing. That is probably not going to be very persuasive to people who already figured that Israel wanted to do this. Ironically, once again in this conflict, I expect the loudest voices telling me that this won't happen and isn't real to be those who have previously advocated for exactly the policy of ethnic cleansing. A new application of the good ol' law of merited impossibility.
-- The paper is dated 10/13. I've lost track of time quite a bit lately for personal reasons, when exactly did Israel begin bombing Northern Gaza and encouraging civilians to remove South? Because it sure looks like they're following the plan outlined in step 1 of Option C: move civilians south. That is going to be viewed as strong proof by Muslims that this is going on; and it is going to lead to tragedy. This document is going to be used to encourage Gazan civilians not to evacuate, which is going to lead to Hamas having a much thicker human shield, which is going to lead to thousands upon thousands of extra deaths. Regardless of its validity, the release of this document is unquestionably a tragedy.
-- The leak could also be a test balloon to see just how bad public reaction to this is. "We're not doing it, we're just brainstorming, no bad ideas, just talking about it...unless?"
-- I'm unfamiliar with the geography of the region, how habitable is the Sinai? My impression from the Bible and occasional references in history is that it ain't great, that Egypt has essentially no use for it beyond controlling the canal. Can you build an actual functioning city in the Sinai? Or is it just an open air prison, by which I mean the population can't leave and would be permanently dependent on imports of food/water? What bribe would Egypt require to open/allow/maintain this prison? Can you trust Egyptian jailers to keep the prisoners in, or will this lead to injecting a million radicals into Egypt's population, probably destabilizing the secular government there? A lot of people like to say "why not just turn Gaza into Singapore?" but is there any realistic universe of economic development in a brand new city in the Sinai?
-- The paper itself...seems pretty persuasive? It compares the De-Hamas-ification of Gaza to the DeNazification plans in Germany after WWII, which took at least seven years of occupation by Allied powers. Arguably the occupation of Germany hasn't ended yet. Seven years of occupation in Gaza would be giving every angry Arab a chance to take a pot-shot at a Jew, every day, for seven years. And gives Hezbollah all the time in the world to plan a Northern front. And PA rule of Gaza has failed before, so maybe it comes right down to where we started. A Final Solution to the Gaza problem has obvious rational appeal. But partition and resettlement is never achieved easily, and never without significant deaths. From a perspective that privileges Israeli Jewish lives over any other value, Option C is probably the right call...on the other hand...
-- Option C is likely to join our collective vocabulary alongside The Final Solution, the Gulag Archipelago, The Situation has Developed Not Necessarily to Our Advantage, Naqba, Pogrom. The expulsion of a population the size of metro Philadelphia is going to be a huge human tragedy inflicting great human suffering on actual people. This suffering, death, impoverishment, and destruction is going to inspire feelings across the Dar Al Islam. While the paper is optimistic about achieving support from the Saudis, Egyptians etc I see no way that the normalization of relations will move forward after Option C.
I don't mean to be an /r/readanotherbook fashion victim, but the situation in Gaza is so obviously to me the plot of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The big event is the potential for peace between the gulf Arabs and Israel, which would be a huge step towards a permanent and sustainable end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. And Hamas' 10/7 attacks were designed, by Hamas, to torpedo that diplimatic process between SA and Israel. The goal of Hamas' attacks was to provoke Israeli reaction, that will make it impossible for the Saudis et al to accept Israeli diplomacy. And the Israelis, in their infinite wisdom, are deciding to do exactly what Hamas hoped they would do, and hoping that if they do it harder and better than Hamas thought they would do it that they'll win. That seems like a fool's bargain. Blessed are the peacemakers. We may have trouble living in the undiscovered country that is peace, but that future should be the one we're striving for, and I'm not sure that Option C leaves much room for it any time soon.
These actually predate the Pentagon. I would be very surprised if they weren’t kept up to date.
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Spongebob-grade thinking: since we're already being practical but evil in talking up mass civilian displacements, why not Simply(tm) move the population of Gaza to the West Bank, annex Gaza, and freeze Area C settlement in place or abandon Area C? This removes all need for Area C settler shenanigans, enables mass filtration and registration, re-establishes Israel as both massively powerful in the region and comparatively generous about it in tangible terms that an honor culture understands, moves Hamas militants and sympathizers into an area both more amenable to policing and a population with a chance of assimilating them into prosperous coexistence, simplifies the security situation by removing an unfriendly border...
This is, of course, an evil act in many ways, and I don't endorse it as a plan of action, but it's been bouncing around my head and I wanted it out. Why's it impractical and more expensive than necessary?
Because Area C is a huge strategic weak point for Israel and essentially needs to be under de facto occupation for Israel to have any strategic depth. It has a much larger border with Israel than Gaza and - unlike Gaza, has a land border with Jordan where smuggling routes are arguably easier than Gaza’s with Egypt (ie you don’t have to traverse the entire Sinai).
No. The land border is in Area A, meaning direct Israeli occupation.I got the Areas wrong againMore options
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I’m considering that this is likely a deliberate leak as psychological demoralization. There’s little chance that a state that relies so heavily on intelligence could just accidentally release a plan for essentially ethnic cleansing at the start of the war and before there are ground troops taking the territory. For one, it’s something that even as a plan creates huge ick responses from most potential Allies in the West who have been taught since preschool that ethnic cleansing is a horrible thing that only evil people do. The wider Arab world will like it even less. The plan isn’t going to work.
But if I’m trying to convince civilians to flee and the less zealous fighters to desert, the prospect of everyone in Gaza being either killed or driven into a tent city in Sinai is probably something that would demoralize. They’re being told that flee or die are the only options on the table. If you have a family in Gaza you’ll probably be much more likely to try to leave than to pick up a weapon.
Not really.
They're saying your options are:
Leave Gaza and you will never be able to return. You will probably end up living in some kind of permanent prison tent city in the Sinai, where no one will particularly want to help you out and there is no clear future for you or your family, except that we are making it clear that under no circumstance will you ever return to your current home.
Stay in Sinai, and of course you may die, but Israel is unwilling to occupy Gaza if the civilian population remains in Gaza. Israel is only willing to or capable of invading if the Gazans leave. The paper makes that point in its review of Options A and B, which envisioned an invasion and occupation of Gaza without ethnic cleansing. Israel views the casualties, both their own and Gazan civilians', as unacceptably high in the scenario where the population remains in Gaza, and believes that it will be forced to withdraw and that the mission of controlling Gaza will fail.
Now, if they could make Option 1 realistically and credibly sound more like: move to Minnesota or Germany or Riyadh, with a path to citizenship and a little money/starting help; then a lot would take that deal. Right now it sounds more likely you'll end up in some awful camp, hoping nothing bad happens to give Egyptians or Israelis an excuse to kill you. Or maybe if Option 2 sounded more like "On December 7th we will drop a series of atomic bombs on Gaza, working our way south, whether anyone is there or not, engaging in what amounts to Civil Engineering by Nuclear Bomb to thoroughly level Gaza from tip to tip." Because right now it sounds more like "We don't have the stones to invade if you stay, so please leave."
But reading the whole paper, what I get out of it is: Leave Gaza and you will be exiled forever to a place where you will live at the whim of those who despise you; stay in Gaza and we will not have the will to outlast you, you will ultimately prevail. Given the themes and virtues of Palestinian culture for the past 80 years, which do you think they will pick?
This reminds me very strongly of the argument made that the USA sent a mixed message to Putin before the Ukraine invasion by offering an escape to Zelensky et al: Please don't invade, but if you invade you will win easily. Putin picked up on that message, to his regret.
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Gazans have no option to leave- the border with Egypt is closed and Israel has blockaded the rest of it.
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If this plan is real, then it’s just cover for genociding Gaza’s civilian population by writing it off as ethnic cleansing instead.
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I've seen the document bounced around, in some cases by people that consider it alone sign of IDF illegitimacy and possible (charitable) motivation for a lot of the heavier resistance by Biden et EU. I'll caveat that the Israel Intelligence Ministry looks like one of many Likud sinecures, rather than a group with power or even particular competence.
That doesn't prevent it from being a trial balloon, but this document is definitely not a 'plan' in the wargames-invading-Canada sense. I've seen more serious analysis done on cocktail napkins.
The paper's "Option C" might be persuasive if you squint, but only under the assumption you can do five impossible things before breakfast. You just have to pressure Egypt (1) and Europe (2) to intake millions of refuges, without massive loss of life (3), get the new refuges to move (4) somehow filtering out at least a large portion of those with terrorist interests (5). The point where it's trying to send an advertising campaign(!) to tell Gazan residents that they're going to permanently lose their land (!!) because "Allah made sure you lose this land because of Hamas’ leadership"(!!!) is the most word game of word games possible.
But there are deeper issues, even presuming it could be done. Hamas-in-Sinai will not stop hating Jews. They will not, as Lebanon has shown, stop lobbing rockets into Israel. The goal is that it'll be harder for them to do worse, but the tradeoff is that after that point kinetic action becomes a possible act of war. The closest relevant city is Arish in northern Sinai: note that <200k population. Northern Sinai isn't as mountainously untraversable as the middle and south, but it's still a desert. Maintaining a million-plus population tent city might be possible (if at a massive financial and humanitarian cost), and people have successfully built cities-in-deserts before, but there's no real honest way to expect it to happen here.
That doesn't put it off the table -- I don't have any good ideas myself! But I don't think these three options are the only available choices, nor that this paper evaluates them honestly.
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What would be the point? Instead of firing rockets from Gaza they'll fire them from Sinai. If the Israeli military could enforce a DMZ we wouldn't be talking about this right now.
I mean this is probably never going to happen, but having a couple of hundred miles of Negev desert/mountains between you and them makes it really hard for them to repeat a 10/7. Easier surveillance for Israel, Much more logistics needed for Hamas, etc.
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That seems stretching term occupation quite far. Are you going to argues that Japan and South Korea are also occupied by USA?
Do they want also a pony? And eternal youth? Egypt was already floating/threatening "and we will take all of them to Europe" or "take them to Europe if you want".
Yeah, sadly so far Hamas is clearly winning. Or at least losing less than Israel.
Yes, obviously. Why would I say otherwise? A nation that has tens of thousands of soldiers from another country is occupied. That asking them to leave seems like it would be basically impossible with current political constraints further solidifies that this is an occupation, albeit a polite and friendly one. Some countries are better to be occupied than others, the Romans and Americans were both civilizing influences that protected the interests of their clients and vassals, but this is still what occupation looks like.
The difference between "occupation" and "allies" or "mercenaries" is that you can politely ask "allies" or "mercenaries" to leave, and they will pack up and go, whereas once you are occupied you lose that ability forever. Guantanamo Bay is occupied. Korea is not.
In the 1950s one could plausibly say that the US was occupying Korea. US troops based in the center of Seoul propped up dictators that benefited US interests. However, fifteen years ago the democratically elected Korean government asked the US to get its troops out of Seoul. The US did. Now there is a large swath of vacant land between the old city and Gangnam. The US is still in Korea, but critically the US garrison in Korea is maintained on the request the Korean government. The relationship is mutually beneficial: the US gains a base of operations counter Chinese expansion, and the Koreans gain a tripwire against North Korean expansion. In particular, the Koreans are willing to pay to keep the US troops garrisoned: when Trump hinted at leaving, the Korean side fussed and then increased their side of the bill. (Japan picked up the whole bill right away without a fuss, because Japan knows it is in their interest to pay to stay in the Pax Americana.) So Korea and Japan willing to pay to be "occupied"? That's not a military occupation by any definition I know. (I don't know anything about Germany but suspect the situation is similar.)
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Yes. I would say that Japan and Germany are both still somewhat constrained in their sovereignty and freedom of movement by the presence of US military bases on their territory, and by the international system those bases symbolize.
Moreover, consider the parallel: an Israeli base in Gaza would be a constant target.
Though I would not call it occupation - I would say that calling PRL (communist period in Poland) a "Russian occupation" is already unusual stretching of this term.
If what happens in Germany is occupation then you may as well consider USA to be occupied by Israel AND Hamas.
I'm mostly being cheeky, but I feel like to properly define Occupation we first need to define Sovereignty and Freedom and all those other fun words and philosophical concepts, along with gaming out counterfactual scenarios where Germany tries to leave the American world-system.
An occupation in my mind is ongoing where you have 1) Foreign troops not drawn from your sovereign state and not under the control of your sovereign state deployed in your sovereign state whose presence 2) significantly restricts the state's sovereignty.
Is obviously satisfied, American troops are neither drawn from nor under the control of Germany
Is where it gets sticky, because German sovereignty is obviously restricted in some ways by the potential consequences of betraying the American system, but Rammstein is more symbolic of the consequences of leaving that system than the enforcer of those consequences, so is their presence the thing restricting those actions?
2a) Then we get into defining Sovereignty. Extremists like 18th-century-radicals along the heart of Kulak will define sovereignty as the complete freedom to do whatever the sovereign chooses, of course no state has ever had that kind of freedom to act. Medieval kings are almost emblematic of sovereignty, but if they made too big a move they would face consequences that would restrict their actions. Is Germany's range of action more restricted, or its consequences faced more severe, such that we say that it is totally restricted in its sovereignty? I don't know.
2b) Defining freedom of action. Would the American troops stationed in Germany be able to physically prevent Germany from invading Poland? Probably not by force, but it is possible that by cutting supply chains that run through those bases and the greater universe of NATO cooperation the USA could make it impossible for Germany to invade Poland.
On balance I don't know if it fully qualifies, but it is certainly close enough to point to as an exemplar of what Israel is in for. Does Israel want to have bases in a Gaza still full of Palestinians 60 years from now?
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From a purely practical standpoint, if the Israelis launch a full scale campaign in Gaza, most of the city likely won't be standing when it's done.
So better to get the civilians out if possible, and I don't see the death toll or humanitarian crisis as likely worse than living in bombed out ruins. The people of Gaza are already close to maximally hostile as far as Israel is concerned as they can be without turning into literal zombies, so I don't blame them in the least for getting them off their doorstep.
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I've been reading a lot about "humanitarian aid" sent into Gaza (by now hundreds of trucks). Does anybody know any source that lists what exactly is being sent? Like this amount of flour, this amount of insulin, this amount of water, etc.? The corporate press is being its usual useless self, resorting to facts only when they absolutely have no other choice, but maybe somebody knows some more obscure, but useful publication, that track what and how many is being sent?
I am especially interested in how many water pipes and how much of fertilizer is included.
What need to drown Hamas tunnels with sewage when it's an inevitable consequence of them fucking up their plumbing?
I got your reference bro.
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The Jewish Conspiracy To Change My Mind
I never had much of an opinion on the whole Israel-Palestinian affair, because — true to my brand — I avoid opining on what I know nothing about. My horrified reaction to Hamas's attacks morphed into existential despondency when I saw others cheering on the massacres with inexplicable glee. My curiosity was piqued, so I read up on the topic with the specific goal of understanding what could motivate joy as a response to carnage. I expected a heavy slog and wrenching ethical dilemmas, all submerged within murky ambiguity. Instead, I was very surprised at how lucid the delineations of the conflict were, and how lopsided the moral clarity was.
I very quickly shifted from 'ignorant agnosticism' towards generally favoring Israel's position on the matter (I can't recall ever changing my mind on an issue so dramatically). I don't want to turn this into a "midwit deludes himself into thinking he's a savant after some Wikipedia perusal" meme — I'm absolutely no expert, but I can't grasp what I'm missing.
I'll start with my opinion on various facets of the conflict, and then finish off with some theories I have for why this issue generates such implacable disagreement.
Motte-and-Bailey: I admit, I never knew what 'Zionist' meant except as a grave denunciation yet the Zionist movement has been fairly transparent about its goals from its beginning in the 19th century. You could categorize its aim across a spectrum, simplified from least to most radical: 1) Jewish homeland somewhere,[1] 2) Jewish homeland somewhere in the Levant, and 3) Exclusive and total Jewish domination of the entire Holy Land. Both pro & anti-Zionism labels have a strategic ambiguity that can be intentionally levered by any extremist wishing to blend in the crowd. There's a similar dynamic with the Palestinian chant 'From the river to the sea', because is it calling for totally and completely erasing Israel from the map? Or is it simply advocating for a coexisting independent Palestine in both the West Bank (river) and Gaza (sea)? Whatever you want! I see the motivations for a Jewish homeland in the Levant to be sound and understandable. The scattered Jewish diaspora suffered unrelenting oppression across millenia virtually anywhere they went, culminating in some particularly nasty pogroms within the Russian Empire in the late 19th century. The general land borders the Zionists agreed upon weren't pulled out of thin air, and although the-land-formerly-known-as-Canaan exchanged bloody hands multiple times, the area historically represented the only cogent Jewish political entities to have ever existed. Zionist migration had already begun in earnest throughout the early 20th century, and the horrors of the Holocaust only further emphasized the necessity for a Jewish state.
Palestinian Land: The area was already inhabited by Arab Muslims by the start of early Zionist migration. The Arabs too have a historical claim to the area and also benefited from being last in the very long list of adverse possession feuds. If a stranger shows up to your figurative house and suggests taking only 20% in response to your attempts to evict them, it's not unreasonable to tell them to fuck off. The Zionists had way more of a diplomatic bargaining chip after the Holocaust, but either way it wasn't unreasonable for the Arabs to reject ceding 56% of the land that was Mandatory Palestine. I don't want to frame this as a "shoulda negotiated" fable, but the practical outcome of the ensuing 1948 war resulted in the creation of Israel with about 78% of the territory. It's reasonable for any loser of a war to hold a grudge against their conquerors.
The Nakba: The human toll of the 1948 war on the Palestinians shouldn't be diminished or overlooked. The war resulted in around 25,000 total dead and the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians, an event forever commemorated by the Arabic word for "catastrophe" — Nakba. Displacement doesn't just mean a change of address; it was a wrenching life upheaval. The Nakba led to squalid refugee camps, outbreaks of diseases like typhoid, and the erasure of villages that had stood for centuries. Material and immaterial culture — homes, orchards, community centers, dialects, local traditions— were lost, perhaps irretrievably. This was very Bad and unfortunately all too common.
Vendetta Forever: Human history is rife with violence, often fueled by ancestral grudges. There's nothing wrong with suggesting that some blood feuds should have been abandoned long ago. Next door to Israel, the ongoing Syrian Civil War has a death toll (500k-600k dead) nearing that of the Nakba's displacement figure, alongside a global refugee crisis.[2] After 12 years of destructive stalemates, the best outcome Syrians can hope for is to solidify the current status quo; it's not plausible for any side to conclusively end the conflict without additional bloodbath. But imagine a Syrian refugee in Turkey disavowing this hypothetical ceasefire and instead pledging a lifelong vendetta — as well as the lives of all his future descendants — fixated on reclaiming his family's vineyard in Homs from Al-Assad's forces. The wounds are still fresh but steering someone away from such an insane and self-destructive fanaticism isn't unreasonable. And yet, that's not the reception Palestinian grievances from 1948 land grabs receive, despite their much older expiration date. I don't want to turn this into a catastrophe pageant competition; we can acknowledge the suffering someone's ancestors endured while also reminding those living that their unyielding attachment to past vendettas has only brought further ruin to themselves and their families. The fanatical obsession over relatively resource-barren land simply cannot be explained by just tallying up the generational wealth the expelled Palestinians lost out on; there's much more than is admitted to here (more on this later).
Arab Humiliation: After the 1948 war, Israel's borders were left on a standstill with an armistice agreement with Egypt taking over Gaza, and Jordan grabbing the West Bank. It's tediously irrelevant to litigate the 'who started it?' chain, but Israel (along with the UK and France) did indeed invade Egypt in 1956 over the Suez Crisis, though they pulled out after a week and Egypt agreed not to block their shipping lanes through the Straits of Tiran. In 1967, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria planned a surprise invasion against Israel but instead got absolutely trounced in what was named the Six Day War. Their invasion didn't just spectacularly fail on its intended merits, but everyinvading country lost significant territory to Israel's counter-offensive (Golan Heights from Syria, West Bank from Jordan, and Gaza Strip plus the entire fucking Sinai Peninsula from Egypt). The Arab League convened three months later and doubled down on their vendetta against Israel, issuing the Three Noes Resolution against Israel: No peace, no negotiation, no recognition. Not content with their first military invasion, they tried another surprise attack six years later in 1973. The Yom Kippur War wasn't as quick, taking slightly less than three weeks to resolve in yet another Israeli victory. It's hard to overstate just how much of an existential humiliation for the Arab world this time period was. The Arabs were ostensibly blessed by Allah Himself, and fighting in their home desert turf, and yet they couldn't put a dent on the Yahud? Knowing full well they couldn't match the Jews in conventional warfare, much of the Palestinian cause shifted towards "unconventional" methods of indiscriminate rocket attacks, suicide bombings, & kidnappings. It's reasonable to discount the Arab countries' self-serving claims about being motivated by the plight of the Palestinian people,[3] because instead of assisting them directly they squandered tens of thousands of lives on foolish military adventures.
Israel Sometimes Lies: Israel, like virtually any other government, has a history and incentives to lie about its actions. The most notable example is the 1996 Qana massacre where IDF lobbed artillery shells at a UN compound in Southern Lebanon, killing over 100 Lebanese civilians. The IDF has maintained it was all totally an accident and initially repeatedly denied they had any reconnaissance drones in the area, until serendipitous UN footage proved otherwise. In 2009, Israel initially denied ever deploying white phosphorus in Gaza, until the video evidence from journalists on the ground was too overwhelming to ignore. In the current phase of the conflict, Israel is simultaneously asserting that 1) Hamas militants were able to break through a heavily-monitored security fence and go on a rampage because of an unprecedented intelligence failure and 2) Israel has the capabilities to execute targeted strikes against Hamas leadership while minimizing civilian casualties within the urban jungles of Gaza. It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of any self-serving claims made by Israel absent any corroborating evidence.
Orthogonal Violence: I'm not a pacifist, but anyone who decides to deploy violence as a tool should be extremely careful they're not simply succumbing towards quenching a primeval bloodthirst. Any application of violence should be oriented towards a specific goal, proportional to the objective, and carried out with humility.[4] I wrote about how the relatively bygone Punch A Nazi discourse failed all three prongs: 1) vague hypothetical that the spread of dangerous ideas will be curtailed if enough "Nazis" are punched in the face, 2) Antifa's awful target acquisition meant random Bernie supporters got metal pipes to the skull, and 3) the violence enactors were generally extremely hostile to any criticism about their tactics. Within this narrow framework[5] I'm willing to say that the suicide bombing of CIA base involved in drone strikes in Afghanistan was justified, as was the targeted assassination of the architects behind the Armenian genocide, and as were either tête-à-tête military battles or guerilla actions between Jewish and Arab forces in 1948.
Perverse Excuses: In contrast, I find no justification for indiscriminate attacks on orthogonal targets. What exactly is the objective and how does murdering Olympic athletes, or bombing a discotheque, or bombing a pizzeria, or murdering bus passengers, or sniping a baby in a stroller get anyone closer to it? The rockets Hamas regularly launches against Israel are slap-dash affairs, jury-rigged from water pipes and common materials. There's no guidance system to speak of, and the most precise aim Hamas could hope for is [waves vaguely over the distance]. Their only practical purpose is to sow psychological trauma on a civilian population, which is as cogent of a definition for terrorism you could get. I don't believe I've encountered anyone directly defending the strategic merits of indiscriminate unguided rocket attacks, or music festival mass shootings. Instead, I see either excuses about how we outsiders shouldn't cast judgement upon the anguished and desperate actions of an oppressed populace, or affirmative declarations that "resistance" is justified through "any means necessary". Hamas leadership parrot this argument, as seen in this rare moment where Ghazi Hamad breaks into English to say that as the victims in this conflict, anything they do is by definition justified. This view is beyond heinous, because it has no bounds. It posits an insane moral outlook that once someone is anointed as sufficiently oppressed, their actions — no matter what! — are indefinitely beyond reproach or scrutiny. This is indistinguishable from how some of my domestic violence clients jettison any semblance of responsibility for their abuse, by focusing exclusively on how they were "provoked" into ripping out a chunk of their girlfriend's scalp. This is a framework I thought was too fucking stupid to entertain seriously, because the parody writes itself. We always can and must maintain the capacity to simultaneous condemn and empathize, without requiring us to plunge into the abyss of moral sociopathy. Jeffrey Dahmer's actions can't suddenly become righteous endeavors if he happened to be a Palestinian eating Israelis. And no matter how righteous a cause might be, it will never be worth having this as one of its Wikipedia pages.
Security Dilemma: I am a proponent of 100% open borders (for both trade & people) but concede it's not a tenable position during ongoing hostilities. It's true, both Gaza and the West Bank are surrounded by formidable security barriers that require Palestinians to be subjected to intrusive, arbitrary, and often humiliating security screening, but it was largely built in response to a wave of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada. I would love to see a free flow of goods and people but any security relaxation whatsoever is immediately exploited, with children as young as 14 regularly employed into martyrdom. I have no idea what the alternative solution is supposed to be here.
Placating the Extremists: Both sides™ of the conflict contend with warring internal strife. On the Israeli side, you have hardcore Zionists who are religiously motivated to habitate as much of the Promised Land as possible, chant "Death to Arabs", and are now forming roving gangs to dispense retributive violence in the West Bank and elsewhere. On the Palestinian side, you have Hamas and its implacable founding principles calling for the absolute and total elimination of all Jews, and a RETVRN to a worldwide caliphate. The messy logistics of coalition politics necessitates cooperating with unsavory actors lest the whole structure irreparably collapses. Any moderate who strays too far from the flock faces serious risk from the fanatics with any sizeable power, which is why Yitzhak Rabin's openness to a peace plan got him assassinated by a right-wing Jewish activist. This also explains Israel's unjustifiable & needlessly antagonist (IMO) settlement policy of sort-of-maybe-not-but-actually-yes encouraging civilian takeover of contested territory. This also explains Yasser Arafat's intransigence during the Camp David talks, refusing to provide any counter-offer after rejecting Israeli's proposal. The moderate wing of either side balances benefiting from the zealot's "enthusiasm", while also making sure not to scare the hoes (by hoes I mean the international community of course).
Apartheid State: Given the constant sloganeering about "Apartheid" and given that Israel was founded to be an ethnostate intended to prioritize the interests of a Jewish population, I was surprised to learn about the conditions of Arab-Israelis. 21% of the population is Arab — almost all of whom are Muslim. Arab-Israelis are nominally afforded the exact same rights as any other Israeli citizen, though there remains rampant disparities in income, employment, and municipal funding. I don't want to pull a Kendi here and claim the only explanation for disparate outcomes is discrimination, because it very well could be a 'pipeline problem' that stems from the aforementioned disparities in public services, or perhaps differences much more inherent. Arabs are exempt from Israel's compulsory military service, which traditionally provides a highly-respected advancement ladder. Arab-Israelis are allowed to volunteer though this virtually never happens but the ones that do are well assimilated into Israeli society, such as the highly-celebrated Captain Amos Yarkoni. But set all that aside for now and just assume that Arab/Jewish disparities are strictly the result of incessant discrimination. It's true that Arab-Israelis earn about 60% as much income as Jewish-Israeli households, yet this roughly translates into an average daily wage of $50 for Arab-Israelis compared to $32 in the West Bank, and $13 in Gaza. I don't know how directly comparable the ratios are to individual income, but as a rough metric Israel's $54k GDP per capita is more than ten times what is available in neighboring Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. By any material measure, Arab-Israelis fare much better under Israeli governance than under any neighboring Arab governance.
Decolonization Narrative: The "colonization" narrative is facile and misleading but let's assume the truth of the charge, what exactly is the complaint? I used to think the "only functioning democracy in the region" mantra was an exaggeration but no, it's true. Some Arab-Israelis even serve in parliament. If the worry is a lack of political self-determination among non-Jewish Israelis, the concern doesn't appear substantiated. Personally, political self-determination has little inherent value to me; it's useful only insofar as it helps foster governance better tailored to a community's needs and if the two aims are ever in tension, I will always prioritize material benefits (give me Hong Kong under British colonial rule over democratic India any day of the week). Israeli governance is already demonstrably vastly superior from a wealth perspective, so I don't understand the complaint lodged. I also personally would always prioritize a cosmopolitan open society over the self-determination of followers of a repressive religion, and nowhere is that schism funnier than with the unironic "Queers for Palestine". Palestinian culture has regressive aspects I have no interest in seeing replicated. Beyond economic comfort and civil freedoms, Israel has demonstrated a broader commitment to cosmopolitan multiculturalism, as illustrated by how the Temple Mount is governed. It's the former site of the destroyed Second Temple (Judaism's holiest site) which was later replaced by the Al-Aqsa Mosque (Islam's third holiest site) and despite its central importance within Jewish lore, I was surprised to find out that Israel has prohibited all Jewish prayer since its takeover of the area in 1967 after the Six Day War. The Temple Mount area is governed by a religious committee composed only of Muslims members. I can't fathom the countervailing scenario where Muslims are willing to prohibit prayers at Al-Aqsa.
Sorry for that encyclopedia up there, I had to get it out of my system. There are no doubt some valid Palestinian grievances scattered among the bloodied ashes above, but I can't shake off the conclusion that much of the unrelenting rage lobbed towards Israel is driven overwhelmingly by petty nationalistic pride, fanatical religious zealotry, or just plain ethnic bigotry. Again, I'm not saying all! Previously, I would roll my eyes at the reflexive refrain that any criticism of Israel is driven by anti-Jewish[6] bigotry. I was generally skeptical of bare allegations of bigotry in any context (as a baseline), but particularly within Israeli discourse given the potential for nationalistic motives to skew reasoning. Some of my skepticism remains warranted, but I readily admit I had seriously underestimated the ambient level of anti-Jewish bigotry.
There's been a real mask-off moment among the Pro-Palestinian movement, with no pushback against the atrocious message discipline. Shortly after Hamas' incursions, before Israel's Gaza pulverization campaign, we had crowds in Sydney with "Gas the jews!" chants. The posters of Israeli children kidnapped by Hamas continues to be irresistible bait for folks driven into an uncontrollable rage to tearing them down, and in the process showcasing their barely-veiled animosity. I feel like I'm insulting everyone's intelligence here because they're not even trying to hide it, otherwise why would anyone cite the expulsion of the Khaybar Jewish community by the Muslims in 628 CE supposedly to protest a country founded in 1948?
The early Zionists secured land through legal purchases, though the transactions were often made with absentee landlords and came as a surprise to the occupants. The Palestinian Arabs reacted with enmity towards the growing Jewish presence in the area, leading to a wave of deadly riots and revolts throughout the 1920s and 1930s. One way to describe the Palestinian reaction here is as violent anti-immigrant vigilantism fueled by racial animus. The enmity was obvious from the neighboring governments too; few instances in history rival the unequivocal refusal to even entertain negotiation or peace as a possibility, as expressed in the Khartoum Declaration. The closest historical analogue I could fathom is maybe Carthago delenda est but even that one was a warning about the threat of a geopolitical rival, not a promise to forever disavow any diplomatic entreaties.
It's funny how easily the phrase "economic anxiety" is lobbed as a punchline to skewer the notion that Trump supporters are motivated by anything except virulent racism. A couple hundred people wielding tiki torches is presented as definitive proof of America's enduring and widespread racism problem, but brays to slaughter the Yahudis is reflexively dismissed as understandable human reactions. If that's your position, the question always remains what evidence would convince you otherwise about their true motivations? If every call to arms about killing all the Jews can be justified within the oppression rubric, you now have an unfalsifiable theory that is immune from scrutiny.
There's an argument on the Palestinian "resistance" side I've seen from several sources that apes the misguided politics of Identitarian Deference. The idea being that someone's willingness to detonate a suicide vest among a crowd of people is conclusive proof of their desperation, because no rational person would do something so terminal unless they were truly pushed to the brink with no other option. In other words, their depravity is evidence of their virtue.
There are so many things wrong with this argument but what I'll focus on is its assumption of rationality, because human beings are capable of acting in all sorts of deranged ways for all sorts of reasons. We have cults whose members are subject to what is functionally elaborate mind control. We have debilitating mental illnesses that rob people's ability to tell what is real and what isn't. And of course, we have fanatical religions that can maintain a robust foothold despite indoctrinating its followers into self-obliteration.
Gaza polling is not totally reliable, but recent findings indicated tepid support for Hamas and its apocalyptic mission, clocking in only at 20%. Yet it's difficult to imagine how such a severe ideology can remain neatly contained within its own bucket. The mentality behind the Hamas militant gleefully bragging to his parents about all the Jews he killed cannot spawn out of thin air, nor could his parents' immediate emotionally-overwhelmed congratulations. The Hamas-run show Tomorrow's Pioneers aired the most deranged children's television segment I have ever seen. In one episode, children sang about how qualified they are for martyrdom (can you believe it gets worse?) and in another, the actual children of Reem Riyashi are invited to sing a song written from their perspectives, about how it's ok their mom couldn't hug them on the last day they saw her...because her arm was too busy holding a bomb.
What's the counter-argument here? Is the homicidal propaganda taken out of context? Is the claim that it's not representative? Maybe that's true, but how can you tell? It's baffling that anyone seriously believes the Palestinian cause is primarily motivated by someone's great-great-grandparent losing their farm 75 years. Al-Aqsa Mosque imagery is inextricably linked with the broader messaging. Hamas names everything after it (TV, brigades, floods, etc.), and Israel's administration of the Mosque itself remains a point of serious contention. Zealots are incentivized to garner broader support for their fanaticism by sanewashing it into palatability, and the unique amalgamation of revolutionary Marxism and Arab nationalism afforded a readily available mantle:
Longstanding land grievances get repackaged as anti-colonial struggle, and genocidal religious fanaticism gets rebranded as anti-imperialist resistance. So when we are presented with acts of extreme desperation, demanding our unquestioning empathy for their purported plight, we can decline. We have the capacity to think critically and carefully scrutinize their self-professed motivation and see if it's in accord with reality. Sometimes we are intentionally fed a misleadingly sanewashed narrative, and sometimes the behavior we're observing is not the result of rational faculties.
I did not revisit some personal interactions until recent events prompted otherwise. Whenever I visited my family back home in Morocco, no other topic generated as much acrimony as Israel. It's a common trope for home families to worry their emigrated members will be brainwashed into secularism, and bizarrely the most scrutiny I ever received from them about my life in the United States wasn't about whether I ate bacon or drank alcohol, but whether I was friends with any Jews. The Yahud aren't to be trusted, they warned, as evidenced by the fact that no Jew was ever killed on 9/11, or by the fact that Mossad created ISIS as a bid to make Arabs look bad (I'm not joking, these claims are unironically professed by several of my family members). I assumed their baffling conspiracies were the understandable byproduct of what had to be justifiable rage against Israel.
I admit deep embarrassment at how under-informed I previously was about this topic. Everything I wrote above took time obviously,[7] but it was all based on readily available sources (ChatGPT was also an amazing help in quickly filling in gaps and finding counter-arguments). My operating assumption used to be that this was all too complicated of an issue to untangle. I presume I might have been influenced by the underdog memeology of a child throwing a rock at a soldier.
I'm also willing to blame media coverage on this topic. This Vox video purporting to 'explain' Gaza is the perfect illustration of this genre of lying by omission. See how much it breezily glosses over the lead-up to the 1947 civil war:
So the UN had a plan but the Jews responded by just kicking people out? Damn that's so crazy! That segue belongs in a museum somewhere, as it eviscerates decades of conspiracy theorizing about who really controls the media.
Ultimately, I find very little to sympathize with on the Palestinian cause. Except for the ongoing West Bank encroachments, I can't take any of the land grievances from 1948, 1967, or 1973 seriously; at least not seriously enough to justify the knee-deep bloodshed. I can't support any movement, no matter how righteous its cause might be, that employs sadistically orthogonal violence. I can't endorse any culture that punishes sexual and political non-conformity with forceful repression. And I want absolutely nothing to do with any ideology capable of such self-serving justifications towards its destructive fanaticism.
Despite the zealous wing in its own house, its history of covering-up its war crimes, and its ongoing settlement expansion campaign, Israel remains the obvious choice for whom to favor if I had to pick. I'm neither Jewish nor do I have any interest in a religious ethnostate, but out of the available options I'd much rather have a society that can build up material comfort enviable to its oil-laden neighbors, establish a semblance of multicultural cosmopolitanism, and provide a haven of responsive governance within a region known for its rarity.
I remain open to having my mind changed. You may attempt this in several ways, including but not limited to:
Point out any specific factual errors or misunderstandings in anything I wrote. If you believe any of my (mostly Wikipedia) sources are too biased or otherwise unreliable, explain why and suggest alternatives.
If you object to Zionism, specify what kind and why.
If you believe persistent Palestinian land grievances remain warranted today, be specific about which ones (Early migrations? 1948? 1967?) and explain why. Also make sure to specify if your standard applies to all displaced people anywhere else, or if it's unique to the Palestinians'.
If you object to how Israel deploys its military or security apparatus, specify if you disagree with their goals or with their tactics, and be specific about what they should do differently.
If you object to my comparative preference for Israeli's model of governance and culture, be specific about which aspects of Palestinian governance/culture have superior merits.
If you disagree with my criticism of oppression-status granting infinite moral immunity, be specific about what limiting principle you'd propose (if any).
That's it. Thank you for weathering through this with me.
Salam & Shalom.
[1] One of the earliest proposals was for Uganda of all places.
[2] Around the same time as the Nakba, the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition resulted in up to 2M dead and up to 20M displaced. It feels unconscionably perverse to flatten the sheer scale of human tragedy here into a glossed reference to "millions" but it's all the time we have.
[3] Israel's Arab neighbors have had a contentious relationship with the Palestinian cause, despite the superficial optics. Palestinian Fedayeen for example tried to overthrow the King of Jordan in 1970. When they got expelled from Jordan, they tried to use Lebanon as a staging ground for attacks against Israel, events which culminated into the protracted Lebanese Civil War. And today, Egypt still enforces its half of the Gaza blockade.
[4] Only after writing this section did I realize I basically rederived the Just War Theory.
[5] For the love of Allah please remember that I am only assessing whether the violence is justified within the contours of bounded scenarios; I am not making any larger pronouncements about the righteousness of any side's cause.
[6] Anti-Semitism is such a misleading term as 'Semitic' is a language family, not an ethnic categorization, and includes Arabic!
[7] Many thanks to the Baileyites for their invaluable feedback.
Why? Why do Jews have a right to invade someone else’s land and ethnically cleanse the native populace? Why aren’t jews obligated to live in humanitarian multiculturalism like ever other western nation on the planet, and instead get violent ethnonationalism that inherently can not cohabitate with the non-Jewish natives of the land they are (violently) immigrating to? Why do the Palestinian people not have a right to resist this?
“Arab” is not a real racial category. It’s a cultural one for speakers of Arabic. I see this a lot with people that are Israel apologists. Basically an attempt to delegitimize and dehumanize the Palestinians as a faceless and vaguely threatening barbaric mass. And an attempt to bring back the terra nullius justification argument for colonialism. Are you sure you were neutral and not… faking? Because you don’t sound it. You sound like a typical agenda’d and hardened culture warrior with all the same boilerplate.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Palestinians are not all Muslim, and it’s very interesting that pro-Israels keep talking about them like they are. There have been Christian Palestinians since about as long as there’s been Christianity. You haven’t outright said it, but this also seems to come with a completely ignorant but political motivated historical belief that the Palestinians are all foreign “Muslim” barbarians that come in at the 600s and took over the joint or something. That’s not how these things work. Egypt turning Muslim (also not all Muslim) did not replace the Egyptians.
There’s no reason to believe the canaanites and yes, Jews, of the area didn’t just convert - like everywhere else.
Historical claim is putting it mildly and quite curiously. Yes, the Poles have a historical claim to their land in a conflict with Germans invading too. The Palestinians are natives of the land. The Zionists are not. Again, they are probably in no small part descendants of the Hasmonean kingdom that converted to Christianity and then Islam. Just as the English are descendants of ancient Celts that converted to Christianity and latin/germanized. There’s no reason to believe otherwise.
The thing is though in the end Syria will still be Syria no matter what shitty dictator or not reigns in the future. Just as Russia weathered an Ivan the Terrible or 2. A war to straight steal land and displace the natives is a whole other kettle of fish. That preeminently changes the geography of the planet and destroys a people in an area forever. The Taino will never come back to the world after the Spanish colonial conquest of the Caribbean. Some things can’t be reversed or 2 things at once.
Being OK with this means accepting on the world scale permanent malevolent wars of conquest as a valid tactic (see Russia right now for why that’s a problem) without any real defensive casus belli. The nature of Zionism means the invaders fundamentally won’t and can’t cohabitate with the natives whose lands they are “moving” to. Their gain comes from the flesh of the other. On the ground, this makes it totally zero sum. That’s not that usual for war actually.
There’s value to what you say. But let’s consider the opposite. What value is there in passivity? Look to the West Bank and see what a more passive stance has achieved. Nothing but further expansion of Jewish colonies and a tightening noose around the Palestinians’ neck. That’s pretty damning. I think it’s objective at this point that “just be more peaceful” is an utter failure and an invitation to personal destruction.
Let’s go there and consider a case of a Jew in Auschwitz. He somehow finds himself in a position to kill a guard’s, who is an avid assistant in mass killing, wife and child. Is it moral and right to do so? If I were in that situation I don’t know what I would do. Per your own arguments, there’s a very, very strong case to be made that innocent should not be hurt. But oh how it stings. At the same time, what good does such moralism do? If the Jew passively lays down and lets the Auschwitz system do its thing without any karmic vengeance, however unfairly undirected, what good does it do? It only assists and convenience an evil act without any consequences.
A key here is that Zionists jews and the proverbial guard put themselves and the “innocent” into a position of aggression and violence. They woke up and chose to wrong another every day. And they could stop at any point if they really cared. They are betting on power saving them from any blowback for their actions. Weakness, only reifies this into being and, from a certain point of view, enables evil into the world. It’s not the same thing as walking up to a random baby and stabbing it for some vague incoherent goals. They could always choose peace.
This is why I suspect the myth of Israel ever giving a damn about the “peace process” (puke) is so popular with Israel apologists. People desperately need to believe Zionists are something other than what they are to apologize for them in normie morality. Like they just tripped, fell, and accidentally violently invaded another people’s land and constantly expanded - to this day. They could always choose not to do this. They could always go back to the 1967 lines and respect the Palestinians. They won’t. Ever.
Your analogy to a self justifying spousal abuser is apt and good food for thought. But are you not by your own admission a person on Israel’s side? Are you not really just asking for the Palestinian’s to conveniently to “let it happen”? What good does moral passive acceptance do? It only make Israel’s job of destruction of the Palestinian people easier. The Zionists do not want the Palestinian’s to exists in “their” territory, which includes all the homeland of the Palestinian people. They, again, by nature can not cohabitate or play nice. This is an existential war of total destruction.
In the end we are all dead. It’s highly questionable to kill the proverbial guard baby in a vague attempt to hurt the guard. But if you are a moral person and do nothing you die anyways. How much better is that than if you became an evil person that died and gave the forces of evil some karmic consequences for their actions that in the end also amounted to nothing?
This is an old post that was questionable to reply to but this is laugh and half. No you aren’t. No apologist for Zionism is. It’s logically impossible.
One state solution? Again, like every western nation is expected. An immediate reversal of “settlements” (colonies) would be a start.
You seem to heavily hinting without stating here that Israel doesn’t really want to be a racially pure Jewish ethnostate. That it took in Palestinian “Arabs” out of multicultural acceptance and not grudging forced calculation.
Did you know Israel has anti-miscegenation laws? There are probably others on the planet but Israel is literally the only one I know of that exists in the modern day. Other examples would be pre civil rights USA and Nazi Germany. It’s not legally possible for for a Jew to marry a non-Jew such as an “Arab.” If Israel did not want to be a racially pure as possible ethnostate the right of return would be a non-issue and the highly demonstrative contrast of Birthright/Taglit free travel tours and citizenship for vaguely Jewish diaspora would not be a thing.
But to be clear, the apartheid charge is for the occupation and treatment of Palestinians outside of Israel proper. At least to me.
One of the first red pilling experiences I had was a family member visiting the West Bank, for non-polticidal reasons, and learning multiple things (they were the often politically erased Palestinian Christians). First how normal and civilized they were. But second that there were checkpoint guards everywhere even in “Palestinian” territory. Palestinians encounter Jews all the time. Jews that absolutely will give your brother a hard time for being a non-Jewish male, and absolutely deeply racially hate you to the very core for being different from them - the enemy. And against popular news implication, they actually don’t all blow up everyday in spastic violence despite constant encounters and humiliation. It blew my mind that you could be Christian and live couple kilometers from the birth and death places of Jesus and just have to decide it’s not worth it to visit holy sites for Easter or Christmas. The Jewish checkpoint guards that sit between your home in Ramallah and “East” Jerusalem will absolutely give your family a hard time and maybe imprison someone for some imagined offense of just shoot. Who’s going to stop or punish them? I instantly understood where the 14 year old rock throwers came from ,where before I was always confused and thought them such savage retards. The West Bank is the Jim Crow South on steroids, but you’ll never see it presented that way to the dipshit BLM libs that watch CNN.
What’s more, Israel blockades Gaza. This would be an illegal act of war if it was a sovereign nation, which the MSM acts like it is for propaganda convenience currently. But it’s not. Nor is it annexed and given equal human rights like it should be, if it’s not a foreign entity. The ever fake “peace process” (spits) acts as a shield to keep the situation in a convenient limbo. This is the apartheid.
It’s objective fact. I always don’t know if people arguing against this are simply historically confused or outright cynically lying. A meandering linked article isn’t going to change anything.
Okay yeah, here we go. +1 point for the not really confused category. There is no such thing as legal valid permanent exclusionary “purchases” of land/people in a society that has no democratic representation. Let’s be clear about something, this was all done with non-voluntary coercive state violence. That’s why it’s a conflict. No one asked the Palestinians until the situation got really, really bad.
Palestine is unique in that it was colonization on behalf of another party. Ethnic replacement colonization is actually pretty rare (e.g. the British left India as India). But normally it would be the colonizers ethnically cleansing the natives. Here the colonized received the action at the barrel of a gun, but for Jews. Probably because the British just didn’t give shit. But that doesn’t change the experience for them.
If the Palestinians had a self-determined state with their own laws and army Zionism NEVER would have happened. That’s pretty clear and absolutely key. No nation concedes to letting foreigners slow invade their land by “purchasing” land with an intent to never again ethnically cohabitate with the native people effectively zero-sum removing it from the former nation. Hell, Americans can’t even purchase own Mexican land at all, let alone create gringo only enclaves with the full intent to create a white only state in Mexico.
I said it before but I’ll say it again. Why did Zionist Jews have a right to violently invade a people against their consent and expel them from their lands. Why are they owed land/flesh at other’s expense? Why is resistance against this a terminal wrong?
Is it legally possible for a muslim to marry a non-muslim without the partner/offspring converting to Islam? I don't think so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam_by_country
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The Alawite minority in power that ferociously prosecuted the civil war because of fear of being genocide are certainly taking notes I'm sure.
If you think sectarian conflict and genocide don't change a region in a meaningful way, then you're just not zooming in close enough. From an alien's perspective, even the Palestinian conflict are just two different sects of the over-arching Abrahamic religion duking it out, with many members being hard to even visually distinguish from one another, especially since many (most?) Israeli Jews are refugees from the rest of the Middle East.
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I welcome all rebuttals, but ideally they address things I actually wrote rather than things you imagine I wrote. I don't know what else I can do except to re-emphasize that I aim to write very transparently, and it's a waste of everyone's time to try and read in between the lines to find out my "true" positions. You are actively encouraged to ask clarifying questions if anything I wrote seems ambiguous. Absent other explanations, I must infer that resorting to this kind of strawmanning stems from a place of frustration — a sign of difficulty in engaging with the points I've clearly laid out.
For example, right out of the gate:
Notice that I said I believe motivations for a Jewish homeland to be sound, and that's distinct from implementations. In the abstract, a Jewish homeland anywhere does not require either invasion or cleansing, but in practice it might be inevitable given the modern geopolitical reality of not having any unclaimed land anywhere. I don't have a good answer for how Zionists could've accomplished their goal completely peacefully, but I also wasn't writing a post about the righteousness of how Israel was founding.
Addressing some of your substantive points:
This is fair pushback. I responded to a similar argument in this other comment.
"I generally take the "Voltairean" position of "I disagree with your chosen form of government, but will defend your right to establish it". I have my own palette of preferred government policies, but also don't want to force them on anyone else (basically think of enclaves in Snow Crash)."
There's the practical hurdle, in that Israel prides itself on its democracy but likely only as long as Jews remain a voting majority. It's not likely they'll be willing to take the demographic and political shift that would come with full annexation; the tension between ethnostate and democracy will never go away. Even if we assume this was feasible, I'm not at all convinced that a one-state solution would mollify the fanatical wing of the broader Palestinian cause.
I was confused by this but understand you meant anti-interfaith marriage laws. No, I didn't know that Israel has no mechanism for legally recognizing interfaith marriages conducted within its borders. It doesn't surprise me given its status as an ethnostate and the heavy influence the extreme Zionist wing has over its politics (e.g. Lehava organization advocates for exactly this). Its aversion to interfaith marriages is not significantly different from how the topic is treated in Islam. From my own limited experience, any time a Moroccan was about to marry a kafir, the immediate question was always whether the spouse was going to convert to Islam.
This is fair, I wasn't as clear as I should have been when addressing the Apartheid issue. The comparison I aimed to draw was to wonder why full annexation by Israel is seen as anathema, from a material standpoint (I already acknowledged Israel's resistance to accepting Palestinians as voting citizens). I could understand the concern if Arab-Israelis had a horrendous quality of life, but they don't. The Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza do endure abject poverty that is made even worse but the intrusive security apparatus and the passively-tolerated spate of settler violence. I concede I should have addressed those circumstances in greater detail, but it would not have materially changed my main point which is the need to critically evaluate the self-professed motivations behind the Palestinian cause, to see which ones hold up with the facts. The problem is genuine valid grievances like the untenable life under occupation get shoved into the same overflowing laundry hamper to provide cover for objective insanity, like suicidal rage over stolen family land someone's grandparents never set foot on.
Lmk if you think there are other points I should address, but please make sure it's in response to something I actually wrote. I welcome all clarifying questions!
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Wow. This is, I think, the first time that I realised you're not Jewish.
I do not think either side has especially-clean hands. Technically I think you could put me on the "pro-Palestine" side insofar as I think current US policy is too pro-Israel, but my real position is "Israel is strategically a bad ally because it commits the USA to some degree of hostility with the Muslim world (also it sells US technology to the PRC), and it's not remotely innocent or poor enough to deserve military aid on a moral level, so the USA should yank its continual and large military aid to Israel".
It should be noted that despite everything the angry students of the counterculture have accomplished, they have never managed to actually turn off that tap. It really does raise some uncomfortable questions when they can do all sorts of obviously-insane shit elsewhere but on this one issue the counterculture-ascendant can't even stop the USA spending tax dollars in the opposite direction. I'm not with @SecureSignals all the way; not all Jews are Zionists (I'm part Ashkenazi, although not a large part), the rest of the West doesn't do this, and buying one issue is not the same as controlling the entire USG (US policy on patents and copyrights has notoriously been bought out for significant amounts of time by interested companies, including diplomatic efforts to push policy into other countries, although even there it's not quite as consistent as this one). But there's a kernel of truth there; AIPAC, the ADL, and other Zionists really do have a concerning amount of power to control US Near East policy like that, and while of course I'm not in solidarity with "gas the Jews" rhetoric it's not entirely obvious that pointing the Eye of Sauron at US Zionism is a net-negative in utility (to be clear, this is contingent on this not actually turning into real pogroms; SJ is a movement that has rather a hard time stopping at a reasonable place, which is why I'm not making the "net-positive" claim).
...how? what?
Neither do I. Neither does anything I said preclude having a different opinion on how involved the US should be.
Your name is obviously not Western or Far Eastern, a lot of Rats are Jewish, and I don't have a good-enough grasp of Jewish or Muslim naming systems to spot the difference by eye (at least without something obvious like an "een" or an "Abu" or an "Ali" or an "al-").
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The only major point I think you fail to address, that would make your argument even stronger, is the unique status of Palestinian refugees under UNRWA vs all other refugees under UNHCR. "Palestinian refugee" does not mean what many people assume it means as a result. It's a status you can inherit, and it's a status you can never get rid of except by returning to land currently held by Israel, hence "right of return". You can be the grandchild of a Palestinian who moved to Detroit in 1948, be a full US Citizen, and still count as a Palestinian refugee as far as the UN is concerned.
You're right that this was an omission on my part. I did address it in a follow-up comment.
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I think you're making the mistake of seeing the people you immediate know and interact with have dumb tribalist reasons for believing what they believe... and then look at see the majority of that movement is composed of such people with largely the same motivations... And then generalize that to the movement, instead of to ALL movements.
I can guarantee you there's some Clever young Israeli/America Jew writing the exact same thing about how his family members have dumb easily disproven, obviously inconsistent beliefs about Israel's ancient right to Pallestine, their explicit and open racism against arabs (the kind of which they're scream for a Second Sherman's march if a southerner said it about blacks)... And then can look and find Israeli politicians and even think tanks making THE EXACT SAME BULLSHIT arguments... but actually affecting policy with it.
Tribalism, stupidity, and arguments as soldiers is the rule, not the exception.
This is why you find rationalists are almost always the polar opposite of their early intellectual enviroment, because that's the ideology they've seen all the way through.
Israel is inherently destabilizing because it never has to negotiate... in spite of being completely outnumbered and outgunned regionally. Israel can fail to negotiate, get into lighting regional wars... and then they should be fucked from the fact it just started a fight with a vastly larger number of people who could just start ww1 or Iran-War style attritional warfare and bleed them out over a year... But that war never happens because they have America to force and sanction a ceasefire for them.
Its as if a guy had only one or two quic punches in him, went to a bar... and got in fights on the knowledge he had a bigger friend there who will break it up after the first few punches when he'd be screwed.
This is why the peace process goes nowhere because Israel's in a heads i win-tails ReFlip position... that's completely artificial and built on exploiting the US taxpayer and trust of the Iowan Christians who'd die fighting a major middle-east war.
Its an inherently belligerent position. They're Serbian nationalists starting shit in the early 20th century on the Knowledge Russia will declare war to protect them.
Likewise all the analysis of "Methods" is complete bullshit when we're comparing An insurgent terrorist movement to a rogue state that's secretly developed nuclear weapons.
Sure when Israel commits genocide against Palestinian refugees, they give Lebanese Christian Militias a nod and a wink and then protect them as they do it in eyesight of the IDF... they make sure there's no pictures of the IDF using a machete or rifle on a mother and child. Likewise they control the tapes when they sex traffic American girls ot Blackmail US politicians ...
the Idea Jeffery Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell were NOT Mossad agents is the conspiracy theory. Who is this shadowy org that can corrupt and recruit the Daughter of Robert Maxwell right under the Mossad's nose, then stop the Mossad and CIA from acting and opening every file to stop the madness, when Epstein got caught and they realize Ghislaine and Epstein were rogue and SEX TRAFFICKING AMERICAN CHILDREN... Was it the Free Masons? Aliens!? Antarctic Space Nazis?
Its a conspiracy theory to say it wasn't exactly what it looked like, and Israel is the single most traitorous enemy America has ever faced.
EVERY SINGLE THING Hamas has ever done has either had direct precedents in something Israel has done to the Palestinians, or has been vastly more restrained and measured.
If this were 2008 I'd say neither side deserves US backing and funding... But in light of Epstein I believe America should Fund and Arm the moderate Gazan rebels. Exactly one of these groups has attacked American children in America.
Then why do they not hold the Sinai Peninusla?
This is ridiculously ahistorical. The last ceasefires happened with Israel's armies deep into enemy territory and still advancing.
And what would have happened if the US and USSR had not pushed a ceasefire?
How many wars end in 6 days!?
If not for the international alliance system, Israel would win and win and win... for the first few months. Then their forces would reach the limits of what they can hold... and then the reality of being 10 million amidst 500 million Muslims would set in and they'd be ground away to nothing by the reality of attritional artillery warfare and urban insurgency... and they'd be fucked.
Israel has never fought a war like the Iran-Iraq war, or the Russo-Ukraine War, or the World Wars, or even the Chinese or US civil wars, or even Vietnam, Iraq, or the Soviet-Afghanistan. Or even the Rhodesian Bush war, where they have to face an armed organized enemy continuously attacking their military and probably civilians for a decade+.
They've always been able to depend on the international order forcing a ceasefire and locking in their victories... and securing hard blockades on their Palestinian enemies, enforce even by their regional rivals in exchange for US Aid.
Rhodesia certainly didn't have the US bribing Mozambique and Zambia to the tunes of billions of dollars a year to enforce secure borders and block smuggling, the way way Israel does with the US bribing Egypt and Jordan.
That is very unusual. Especially in the 20th century. And it is NOT stable.
The fact that they then decided to Sex Traffick the children of the power they desperately need to backstop 100% of their regional security concerns is the cherry on top.
Israel’s main adversaries in previous conventional wars have not demonstrated themselves capable of transitioning to a war of attrition against a competent military.
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Israel would have been stuck trying to occupy Egypt and Syria. If they'd had any sense they have withdrawn to defensible lines after confiscating or destroying as much enemy material they could get their hands on. It would take those countries considerable time to rebuild.
As they've proven in their current situation, you can put up with that sort of thing indefinitely.
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I kind of disagree with this, yes. The limiting factor is having a chance to flourish.
Hypothetical: A guy comes into your house to murder you. He has a gun and spec-ops training; you are a keyboard warrior; he will definitely find you and murder you. The best you can hope for is maybe take him by surprise and give him some bruises. Do you hang out in broad daylight, sheepishly say "guess you caught me" and let yourself be shot? Or do you do the fucker as much damage as you can?
The game theory is this: every decision to exploit somebody exists on a margin spectrum. You are trying to extract as much benefit as possible for a given effort cost; if the other can raise the effort or lower the benefit, it incentivizes you to maybe leave them alone. But we never know where somebody's cut-off point is, so there's always an incentive, if you notice you're being fucked over, to do as much damage as you can back.
So there's a very tentative hypothetical we can construct here to advocate for Palestinean terrorism. Israel is clearly fucking them while exploiting "their" land (whether your game theory implementation advocates forgiveness or revenge here probably depends on preexisting sentiment, but revenge is at least plausible), Israel is clearly trying to minimize effort costs with Gaza, maybe if you can impose some costs on Israel, it'll push them closer to the threshold or at any rate strengthen your negotiating position. In game theory, a person who never plays 'defect' isn't an agent but a resource. Hamas chose the most damaging strategy available to them. Did it break existing compacts? Sure, but I'd presume they assumed that they could not get fucked any worse than they were. Will it work? Probably no.
Okay, cynic hat on: no, but the cost of it not working will not fall on Hamas. IMO, Israel can't really do anything (not hugely expensive) here that will hurt Hamas more than it drives recruitment. From the cynical view, Hamas and the authoritarian movement in Israel are obviously just playing Toxoplasma Tennis. B attacks A'. This enrages A! A cannot fight B, so it attacks B'. This enrages B! B also cannot (cheaply) fight A, so it attacks A', and so on. Part of the reason I don't really have a strong moral view against Hamas is that if this is an accurate model, it's obviously "cooperative" to some extent. Hamas benefits Netanyahu, and conversely. And whenever a cycle like that exists, blaming the most recent hit on whoever committed it is looking at the wrong component. It's a systemic effect. Remove Hamas, another terror group will be found. There is a gap here that allows the existence of a feedback cycle, so a feedback cycle arises. Anyway, in this particular case, the cycle might be running out of control because somebody, A or B, underestimated the damage the current serve would do, so it's unclear what happens next. But my moral view to "let's put the angry people in a cage and then send the guard away" is: a stupid game was played, and a stupid prize was won, I feel bad for the victims but not angry at the perpetrators; it's not like they were the load-bearing causal component.
To loop back: why did I say "the limiting factor is having a chance to flourish?" Well, how do you get out of a cycle like this? You find better things to do with your life. Not sure how good a life you could have in Gaza City. If you could have a good life, a dignified life, a life with authorship and respect, and then you go on a revenge bender - well, I am a humanist, I want to maximize flourishing. When people live an unworthy life, I welcome attempts to, even counterfactually, push for a better life; when people could already live a worthy life, I don't. Do I think Gazans lack the capability to live a worthwhile life? I don't know, honestly, but if I wanted to construct a moral case for terrorism, that's where I'd start.
Addendum: When this conflict started, I said to a family member: "I don't think what Hamas did was right, but I am willing to bet on two things: at the end of this, a lot more Palestineans will have died than Israelis; and at the end of this, Hamas will still be there." If Israel wants to convince me that I'm wrong about the Toxoplasma Tennis thing, those are the two factors they should try to improve.
I concede you present a valid justification of orthogonal violence. There are indeed scenarios where effective resistance is impossible, and the only tools available involving making enemy action as painful as possible, third parties be damned.
Even with these concessions, we can still objectively evaluate the legitimacy of this genre of resistance. In your spec-ops assassin hypothetical, the legitimacy of your orthogonal resistance will depend in part to the legitimacy for why the assassin is even after you. Is it because he's dispatched by a tyrannical government intent on silencing your criticism of it? Then yeah, legit resistance, good luck doing whatever you can. But is it because you murdered the assassin's entire family years ago? Well, good riddance to you.
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I think pre-committing to orthogonal violence is sometimes rational. Response nuclear strikes in mutually assured destruction are purely orthogonal violence: you destroyed our cities, therefore we destroy your cities. The point is not that the decision is reasonable once the nukes are approaching you, but that being a country which responds tit-for-tat will make it less likely that you are nuked in the first place. Just have enough Petrovs to avoid any false-positives.
Ideally, such orthogonal violence remains counterfactual.
I also agree that there are circumstances where the best you can do is to scratch the enemy with whatever resources you've got. My go to example is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. If the enemies plan is to send your family to Auschwitz, it is entirely permissible to turn your family into weapons which are supposed to hurt the enemy in the process. Under such circumstances, I would be okay with turning children into suicide bombers if they would otherwise be killed in the gas chambers.
The big difference between the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Gazans is that the latter group do not face a genocide. Most of the hardships of the Gazans is a consequence of decisions of their leadership. If you find yourself being an inmate in an asylum, it might strike you as a good idea to attack the orderlies, giving them a black eye in the process. Unfortunately, this will end up with you in a straight jacket, which will lower your quality of life a lot more than the black eye you gave the orderly. If you then proceed to kick, bite and headbutt, the main thing which will change is that you will have more and more constraints. This is the situation Gaza finds itself in. (Of course, this metaphor glosses over the differences in interest between the Gazans and Hamas. Hamas has every interest in turning Gaza into hell on earth, because flourishing people make bad Jihadists.)
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African-Americans in the 50's and 60's fared much better under American governance that under any African governance. They still demanded equal rights with the Whites and, while they supported decolonization, weren't that eager to move to the newly independent African countries or even to Liberia.
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Suppose someone is unjustly jailed and destined for execution. He's exhausted all legal avenues for reprieve. He discovers a way to escape, but it means murdering his jailors, who are innocent blokes just trying to make a living. So he performs his plan, leading to suffering of both his victims and their families. Is he worthy of condemnation? My gut instinct says pretty clearly no.
The key limiting principle is about effectiveness: he's got a plausible, concrete plan of action that can lead to his goal. Murdering one of his jailors just to make a point would be reprehensible. The issue with both Hamas and Israel is that neither of them seem to have a concrete plan for their suffering-creating acts to lead to their desired goals. Razing Gaza to the ground is only marginally more likely to get Israel increased long term security for its citizens than murdering folks at a music festival is going to get Hamas a state from river to sea.
It sucks for Israel, because its goals are more reasonable than those of Hamas (even granting those their most generous interpretation). But sometimes you're just stuck with an unfortunate hand: if a country deals with tornadoes that kill hundreds of people every year, it sucks, but it doesn't mean you should drop bombs on your neighbor, because those bombs aren't going to do anything to make the tornadoes go away.
This is not a good analogy because Hamas members aren't unjustly jailed and Hamas directed it's attacks at random civilians, not prospective jailers. Nor did they need to kill civilians as part of their escape. And even if you're using jailers in the loose sense of people who are responsible for infringing on the liberties of Gazans, so politicians, police, military, maybe some bueraucrats and civil servants (which still doesn't fit who Hamas attacked), then there's all sorts of wider implications for where else you'd find similar attacks to be acceptable. The elephant in the room is the mass false imprisonments associated with lockdowns, but there are plenty of other causes you could find where some individual group was plausibly unjustly prosecuted and now supposedly have justification to murder 1,000+ civilians?
To put it another way, this justification for Hamas's actions would apply far better to actions that are far more universally condemned.
So is this a consistent gut instinct or no?
It's consistent: if it isn't clear, I think both Israel and Hamas are the prisoners who murder an innocent guard for no reason, just to make a point, which is reprehensible.
That said, it's a bullet I'm willing to bite: if either Hamas or Israel had a solution that killed thousands of innocents that actually managed to solve their problems, I'd consider it morally acceptable. (That said, I'm rooting for Israel's vision for the region over Hamas's, but I classify that as an aesthetic preference, not a moral one.)
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The tornados that I'm familiar with do not have moral agency, and that is one of the many differences between them and humans. Is there a particular reason to suggest that Palestinians do not have moral agency?
Agency is only relevant to the extent it gives you additional levers to achieve your goals: if you can create some incentive structure among your enemies to result in better outcomes for you, then of course you should.
Does it seem likely that Palestinians will respond in a way amendable to Israel to a more militarized incentive structure?
I don't think there is a plausible strategy that Israel could pursue that would result in a friendly response from the Palestinians.
However, given a sufficiently militarized incentive structure, one might be able to proceed from "negative response" to "no response." If the Palestinians are moral agents, this incentive structure could be described as the just deserts of their previous actions.
I agree that Israel is stuck with an unfortunate hand; I do not agree that they are left without effective strategies.
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It’s HBD. It’s literally HBD, plus maybe some culture stuff.
The vast majority of Israeli Arabs are Muslims, but the small number who are Christian compete with Israeli Jews just fine in terms of outcomes.
Why cut off that last part to make the same point as me?
That’s a fair criticism of my quote, editing it in.
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There are two important omissions and inaccuracies IMO:
You ignore the DNA evidence that Palestinians are the direct ancestors of ancient Canaanite and Levantine inhabitants of the land, and doubly ignore that Ashkenazim — the chief instigators of Zionism — are half-European in DNA. The crucial question of who the original inhabitants are is swept aside with a misleading, “the area was already inhabited by Arab Muslims by the start of early Zionist migration [who were the] last in the very long list of adverse possession feuds”. But Palestinians are Arabized more than Arab. They took on the dominant Arab culture and language, and intermixed with Arabs, but this in no way denies their claim to original occupancy. If I leave Ireland for Germany and marry a German girl, and meanwhile the Irish who stayed in Ireland changed their language and creed and adopted some Arab immigrants, I would be (reasonably) laughed at if I arrived by boat and demanded claim to half the land as an original inhabitant.
You claim that you could never “support any movement, no matter how righteous its cause might be, that employs sadistically orthogonal violence”. Yet this is precisely how the early Zionists obtained as much land as they did. A chunk of it was purchased through less sadistic means, yes, by concealing their intent to ethnically cleanse the land and only hire Jewish workers. But for much of the land they inflicted terror on the British to pressure them into favorable terms, and terrorized the Palestinians to force them into fleeing. 1, 2, 3. This is important to dwell on: how would Israel behave if their bloodshed couldn’t be excused by targeting Hamas leaders? 40% of their missile strike casualties so far have killed under-18s, right? (The Haaretz figure on the original Hamas incursion, half-complete, is that Hamas killed just 20 under-18s). If Israel lacked a powerful state — if they were in the shoes of the Palestinians — would they engage in sadistic orthogonal violence? History says yes. That’s how they were founded. And they also hid under civilian cover, at one point requiring the British to institute a curfew of 200,000 Jews.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing?wprov=sfti1#
I never heard of this before. They get points that the objective (destroying incriminating information) was directly related to their overall mission, and some points if their claims about the warning are true. The intent here does not seem orthogonal, and if the warnings are to believed then it was somewhat proportional. Falsifying my position would be either if they tried to destroy the documents by flattening the entire hotel, or if their objective was maximizing civilian casualties. Then it would be a matter of assessing the whole movement to see what the typical tactic was. I really have no current opinion on whether the Jewish insurgency was "worth it" or not now, but that's how I would generally go about it if I was trying to answer it.
Had you heard of the Irgun generally, or read about their other actions prior to the founding of Israel? Have you heard about how the soon-to-be Israelis purged Palestinian villages, systematically bombed homes, raped and murdered indiscriminately, and broadcast their atrocities and their threats of worse to come in an attempt to induce the surrounding natives to flee?
Had you heard of Sabra and Shatila, presided over and actively facilitated by an IDF commander who went on to be elected Prime Minister of Israel?
Had you heard of "the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah, and the nation of Israel" by shooting up a crowded mosque with an assault rifle, killing 29 and wounding 125, whose grave was subsequently made into a shrine by his fellow settlers?
Are you familiar with the settlers generally, how they're armed, how they operate, the sort of abuse and random violence and murder they've spent decades inflicting on their Palestinian neighbors, including women and children, with the tacit and occasionally explicit cooperation of the Israeli government?
Are you familiar with the concept of a "price tag attack"? What's your estimate of the efficacy of Israeli law-enforcement against the perpetrators of such attacks?
Are you familiar with the long, long history of incidents like this one? I recall you being somewhat off-put by the results of police procedure in the case of George Floyd; How would you compare those to a policy whereby a 13-year-old girl with a backpack can not only be shot on sight while running away, but can be finished off by point-blank rifle fire, the officer who pulled the trigger can be caught lying about the details of the incident, be charged only with minor offenses, and then be acquitted on all charges by the courts? Have you read enough about the general policies and actions of the Israeli security forces to get a feel for whether this sort of behavior and legal outcomes are representative, or just Chinese cardiologists?
Are you familiar with the history of Israeli involvement in the incubation of Hamas itself, in a bid to play divide-and-conquer against the PLO?
The above is by no means exhaustive. You and a great many others here seem to be operating under the assumption that the story requires there to be a good guy. It does not. Both sides can in fact be completely awful, even if one side is relatively rich and sophisticated and produces fancy microchips and CS papers and has lots of influential supporters. Nor is there any requirement that there be a reasonable solution to the situation. It is, in fact, entirely possible to create a situation where the only sane option remaining is to leave, and those who choose to stay deserve what they get.
I do not care what the Palestinians do to the Israelis, and I do not care what the Israelis do to the Palestinians. I am thankful that I live nowhere near either of them, and wish to have as little as possible to do with either of them. It seems to me that they are best considered a cautionary example, not a problem with a solution. Observe from a distance, and learn from their miseries.
[EDIT] ...If the above comes across as hostile, I apologize. If you managed to get this far in life knowing nothing of significance about the Israel/Palestine conflict, I envy you, and encourage you to attempt to maintain your streak.
Sorry for the late reply! No, I have not heard of many of the examples you cite when I wrote my post.
I agree that expanding upon many subjects you mention ("price tag attacks", lack of scrutiny over how the IDF operates, etc.) would have been useful additional context. While I didn't set out to write a comprehensive history with infinite word count, I never intended to gloss over Israel's actions here. I did mention how the IDF lied about its culpability in the Qana massacre, and did mention the extreme Zionists responsible for vigilante retributive violence.
I did not believe that a history of Irgun or Israel's involvement in creating Hamas was all that relevant. I generally am quite dismissive about how relevant sins from however many decades ago should be, regardless of how well documented they are. I'm not claiming you're making this argument, but I'm reminded of the attempts to tar the United States as indelibly tainted because of its original sin of slavery from 1619. A denunciation of slavery's ills in the past does not require a blanket denunciation of America today.
I'm not trying to wriggle out of the standards I outlined and I encourage you to call me out if you think otherwise. When I offered the scenario of Zionist militias relying on terrorism to achieve their goals, I can still denounce their movement at the time as not worth it. But it would be odd for me to denounce Israel's current existence because of events from 75 years ago. Especially since there's more than enough current behavior to denounce.
I completely agree that nothing requires there to be a "good guy" here, and that both sides indeed can be awful. That said, the reason I included "...if I had to pick" was to avoid a common trap within political discourse that essentially boils down to "we can easily solve this problem if everyone just starts behaving rationally". I also wanted to avoid the nihilism that comes along with concluding that "everyone is equally bad". Even if you "pick" Israel as I do, there's nothing preventing anyone from sharply criticizing any of its policies or actions. Remember that it's a comparative ranking, not an absolute one.
Much of your OP was spent discussing the relevant sins of the Arabs/Palestinians, though.
I personally find that actions' relevancy degrades sharply in proportion to their age. I addressed the historical events because 1) that's what people claim is relevant and 2) to argue against their relevance. So Hamas did indeed commit some horrendous shit 20 years ago during the second intifada, which illustrates what motivates it. But much more relevant is using the second intifada to explore whether they are motivated by the same ideology (they are) or interested in changing their behavior (they aren't) today. If Hamas had somehow successfully turned Gaza into Singapore-on-the-Mediterranean in recent years, I'm not going to care as much about what the organization did in the past.
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This post is a Gish gallop.
From your own link:
But refuting every claim you posted would take too much time and effort--that's how a Gish gallop works.
"Price tag attacks" seem to be a similar herring:
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It is not. The OP decided to get informed about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict immediately after one of the worst things the Palestinians have ever done, and expressed bewilderment at why some people have limited sympathy for the Israelis. I'm sketching out the part of the picture he's missing: The Israelis, as a matter of fact, have done some extremely awful things themselves.
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The casualties seem to belie both the idea that it was narrowly targeted and the idea that there was a warning placed. 91 dead, mostly civilians unrelated to the military occupation, does not equate to a narrowly targeted action. Especially when the target was documents, rather than men or materiel. They blew up a hotel, not a barracks, to target a civilian admin office, not a military command post.
King David had a non-terror objective, if a stupid one, and (allegedly) tried to minimize deaths by calling ahead multiple times -- there's a mix of conspiracy theories about who didn't forward what messages. Which is still bad, but if you want really atrocious early Zionist efforts, the Irgun bombings targeting markets as explicitly retribution and random on Arabs are very worth being aware of and absolutely beyond the pale (see here for a fuller list, though it does mix both terror attacks and pseudomilitary ones).
Most of these ranged from merely non-productive to hilariously counterproductive, and Irgun's claim to pioneer pre-attack warnings was both wildly self-serving and sometimes just a lie. I don't think you can honestly claim that they caused Arab unwillingness to recognize Jewish peoples -- the 1920 immediate reaction to the Balfour declaration and Faisal-Weizmann say a lot, despite predating almost all of the violent riots and having little to no detail about what or wear -- but even contemporaneously Irgun (and Lehi) were well-recognized as having cemented and legitimized that response, for very little gain.
More recently, you have the Duma arson and Abu Khdeir torture-murder, or (while not successful) a number of attempted or encouraged attacks on Peace Now activists (aka other Israelis, sometimes Jewish ones). Those resulting in fatalities usually result in conviction and serious sentencing by Israeli justice systems, but non-fatal incidents pretty regularly result in No Suspects Being Found.
Can you provide sources for these claims?
Wikipedia has a few different cites saying that at least one of the goals was to destroy paperwork linking the Jewish Agency to attacks, but even if you're skeptical of that, somewhere between half to two-thirds of the hotel had been used for the British Mandate's administration, which was heavily disrupted by the bombing. Clearly not worth the moral sin (or negative publicity), but very separate from the purpose of changing policy by violence (which they did use elsewhere) or violence for its own sake/'revenge' (ditto).
Well, of the two I linked... for the Duma arson, Amiram Ben-Uliel was found guilty of the Duma arson and sentenced to life imprisonment, though the minor who assisted in planned only got a short sentence (~10 months plus what had been served during the trial). For Abu Khdeir, Yosef Haim Ben-David got a life sentence-plus, one of the unnamed minors got life(ish) and the other 21 years (... probably will end up closer to ten).
((This complaint about too-short sentences isn't specifically tied to the Israel-Palestine stuff; see Schlissel. But obviously there's both more options and more harm in the context of the West Bank.))
There have been failures to convict (or even try or find) some Israeli civilian murderers of clear homicide, and the environment there makes claims to self-defense extremely difficult to treat fairly, so there's a reason I say usually. And the rules of engagement for the IDF specifically are a very bad joke. But there's a lot of summaries of settler violence that try to give the impression that it's a no-bag-limit hunt, and the presence of any convictions makes that hard to support.
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How are Ashkenazim "the chief instigators of Zionism"? Mizrahi Jews in Israel make up over 60% of the nation's Jewish population, and their politics are to the right relative to the country.
Because the word instigate means to initiate, or cause to occur, or to begin urging some action. Zionism, as a modern era push to create a Jewish state, began with Ashkenazi Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Zionism
You're right, I didn't understand what the word "instigate" meant. I thought you claimed that Ashkenazi Jews are the chief supporters / proponents of Zionism in modern Israel - but that was not your claim.
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This is a list of names cleared for publication, not all killed.
I specifically wrote that it is half-complete. It is possible that more under-18s will come out in the full list, but 40 is also the widely distributed number of children killed.
And now you don't even have a link.
The Haaretz paper has every name and age of half the killed… which I linked and specified. So your original point wasn’t very relevant, though I grant the unlikely possibility they are holding back on the children’s’ names. If you look at the number provided, it’s half the total of the dead. Here’s someone doing an age breakdown: https://twitter.com/lqgist/status/1717623479225241672
The only number we have ever gotten on children killed is 40, which came from the original reporting, and was briefly (and falsely) amalgamated with a story of beheaded babies: here’s a link. Israel has been opaque on total numbers.
Anyway, I stand by my original sentence as being adequately sourced and qualified:
... your defense, when someone points out that the first and only number you provided in this context is wildly inappropriate as a value, is to point to a higher count, which is over three weeks old, and which is no more clearly a complete total.
I'm not that clear on the timelines or any of it really, but Haaretz seems to be updating the article as more names are released; it's here:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-19/ty-article-magazine/israels-dead-the-names-of-those-killed-in-hamas-massacres-and-the-israel-hamas-war/0000018b-325c-d450-a3af-7b5cf0210000
and appears to be up to 1097 names out of "over 1300" -- so a pretty big sample now. Not sure whether any of the deboonkers have updated their figures, and I'm sure not going through all those names -- but scrolling over it a lot of them do seem to have military ranks next to there names.
Which does not preclude many of them being civilians no longer on active duty, but would be weird if there were many babies like that.