naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
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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.
Regarding Western liberal narratives on the Gaza war, I’m noticing something I find somewhat odd. I see mainstream liberals arguing that clueless college students are indoctrinated by loony leftist propagandists to be rabid enemies of Israel, our greatest ally, the only democracy in the Middle East etc. And they seem to be saying this without any reflection on the past, where conservatives they hate, like Ben Shapiro and others, have been warning everyone of the same trend for basically two decades, at least since the early years of Bush Jr’s presidency. Now that the true extent of anti-Zionist agitation on Western college campuses is revealed on prime TV for the first time in almost a decade (the last major Israeli military operation in Gaza was in 2014, I reckon, not counting the mass shootings at the border in 2018 or so), targeted at a nation and a people they actually care about, suddenly it’s a real problem, a real concern to be tackled.
Now I understand that one can come up with all sorts of cynical and mundane interpretations as to why this is, how it’s unsurprising and so on, and I get that. But then I remember that there were violent anti-police protests in the summer of 2020, the campaign to remove Confederate monuments, the various protests against Trump’s rallies, and in these cases the tone of the protests were, as far as I can tell, pretty much set by the same leftist college agitators who initiate the current anti-Zionist protests, the ones who call themselves anticolonialists, social justice advocates, antiracists and so on. And the big difference was that they weren’t criticized by mainstream liberals the way they are now, even though all their agitation and messaging stems from the same ideological tenets.
Colleges have always been super anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be a Ben Shapiro weirdo to know that.
The only thing that seems different now is that the Nikki Haleys of the world are explicitly saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, so the activist college students are saying “ok guess I’m anti-Semitic too.”
It’s the same phenomenon that people talk about here re: racism. You call everything racist and eventually people start saying “ok guess I’m racist.”
In modern times, anti-Zionism has always been some flavor of anti-Semitism. At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
As for the colleges, it appears this time people on the left are finding out that "it's just a few kids on college campuses" is not really reassuring in the slightest. As when the conservative-leaning normies found out, it's likely too late for them.
At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).
popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
The zionists are right. I don’t see any solution to this that doesn’t eventually look like a Zionism transposed to some other location. The historic record here is pretty clear — a stateless Jewish minority is going to be the target of either states looking for a scapegoat or angry mobs taking matters into their own hands. In most Muslim countries, non Muslims are second class citizens at best. So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere. If that’s the case, you need to create a continuous land area in which Jews are given complete control. And you’re now displacing whoever lives there now. It ends up looking almost exactly like Israel except now we’re building in South America or Montana or Wales or something. There aren’t really good answers.
So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere.
I feel like it is important to point out that however valid this argument may be, making it forever forecloses your ability to criticise Trump, the alt-right and white nationalists. Once you cross this line you lose the ethical and moral ground which allows you to say that white nationalism/ethnonationalism is bad at all. There simply aren't any real arguments for why the Jews need to be protected and get their own ethnostate that don't also apply to white or yellow people beyond blatant ethnic supremacy (that would sound something like "The Jews get to have their own nation because they're God's chosen people and above all others").
And while this is the motte and hence nobody cares that a pseudonymous Zensunni wanderer can't exactly condemn Trump anymore, these concerns become much bigger in the real world where people make political statements tied to their identity. All these public arguments, discussions and comments about what's happening are going to be remembered, and the left is famous for digging into people's past comments in order to discredit them in arguments so this isn't exactly a purely academic concern.
There simply aren't any real arguments for why the Jews need to be protected and get their own ethnostate that don't also apply to white or yellow people beyond blatant ethnic supremacy
That's not true. E.g. whites are much more numerous. It's not realistic to imagine that whites in the USA could suffer the same fate as Jews in Germany - there's too many of them.
White people are vanishingly small as a percentage of the total population on Earth, so all you're saying is that we just have to wait a bit longer before they can have their own ethnostate? Would you also support Israel ceasing to be an ethnostate once the jewish diaspora population gets a bit bigger? How you slice the salami matters a lot too - do the Boers get to have their own ethnostate, given that they are a tiny minority on the verge of being wiped out and far smaller in population than the jews? I'm struggling to see the actual principle here - "you only get an ethnostate if you could plausibly be wiped out" is a contradictory and self-defeating argument anyway because it means that the moment you have the ethnostate you're protected and hence no longer deserve it... and if the ethnostate DOESN'T protect you, then there's no point tying it to numbers like that.
I think each people group is well served to have at least one country where they are a majority. Whether or not a country exists for the explicit purpose of giving them a majority is pretty much immaterial. E.g. Egypt is not a country formed for the purpose of giving Arabs a state of their own, but it nonetheless functions perfectly well as an Arab-majority country, such that the establishment of an Arab ethnostate is unnecessary. Whites don't need an ethnostate because we already have the thing that an ethnostate would exist to give us. E.g. when white Zimbabweans were a persecuted minority, they had somewhere to flee to that opened the doors for them.
And yes, this does mean I would like the Boers to have their own land - ideally they would have beaten the British and the Orange Free State would have survived. Alas.
Jews get to have an ethnostate because they’ve been genocided several times. I don’t think that’s identical to other arguments. I’m not worried about other states wanting to have an ethnostate if they want one.
White people have also been genocided several times through history as well (European history is surprisingly brutal). They're still around, but if that's an argument against them getting an ethnostate then it also applies to the jews.
Honestly when you saw the riots in Paris and the marches and London maybe it isn’t unreasonable to keep France for the French or England for the English.
Personally I thought the Rotherham case was a far greater argument for keeping England for the English. I'm not even going to feign a lack of disgust at people who think protests in favour of Hamas are where the line was crossed as opposed to Rotherham (though to clarify I'm not accusing you of this right now).
There is no actual reason to suppose that if every Israeli Jew were granted the right to live in the US or Australia or the Netherlands or someplace, they would be vulnerable to scapegoating or pogroms. Sure, in Saudi they would, but granting Jews the right of return to Australia would not actually make them vulnerable to discrimination- they just wouldn't have their own country.
Australia is an immigration friendly place, but even so 7 million people all at once would be stretching the friendship a bit.
Edit: Also, we did just have a big crowd in Sydney chanting "gas the jews". Such people are an extreme fringe, but can anyone guarantee they will remain a fringe?
That was just an example, you know. No doubt a 1-state solution where the Palestinians are full citizens, backstopped by the CANZUK nations pledging to accept any Israeli Jewish immigrant who applies, would not result in a Jewish genocide(although it might well result in far fewer Jews in a generation as some of the conditions leading to a high Israeli-Jewish birthrate are probably unique to Israel).
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Notes -
Regarding Western liberal narratives on the Gaza war, I’m noticing something I find somewhat odd. I see mainstream liberals arguing that clueless college students are indoctrinated by loony leftist propagandists to be rabid enemies of Israel, our greatest ally, the only democracy in the Middle East etc. And they seem to be saying this without any reflection on the past, where conservatives they hate, like Ben Shapiro and others, have been warning everyone of the same trend for basically two decades, at least since the early years of Bush Jr’s presidency. Now that the true extent of anti-Zionist agitation on Western college campuses is revealed on prime TV for the first time in almost a decade (the last major Israeli military operation in Gaza was in 2014, I reckon, not counting the mass shootings at the border in 2018 or so), targeted at a nation and a people they actually care about, suddenly it’s a real problem, a real concern to be tackled.
Now I understand that one can come up with all sorts of cynical and mundane interpretations as to why this is, how it’s unsurprising and so on, and I get that. But then I remember that there were violent anti-police protests in the summer of 2020, the campaign to remove Confederate monuments, the various protests against Trump’s rallies, and in these cases the tone of the protests were, as far as I can tell, pretty much set by the same leftist college agitators who initiate the current anti-Zionist protests, the ones who call themselves anticolonialists, social justice advocates, antiracists and so on. And the big difference was that they weren’t criticized by mainstream liberals the way they are now, even though all their agitation and messaging stems from the same ideological tenets.
Colleges have always been super anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be a Ben Shapiro weirdo to know that.
The only thing that seems different now is that the Nikki Haleys of the world are explicitly saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, so the activist college students are saying “ok guess I’m anti-Semitic too.”
It’s the same phenomenon that people talk about here re: racism. You call everything racist and eventually people start saying “ok guess I’m racist.”
In modern times, anti-Zionism has always been some flavor of anti-Semitism. At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
As for the colleges, it appears this time people on the left are finding out that "it's just a few kids on college campuses" is not really reassuring in the slightest. As when the conservative-leaning normies found out, it's likely too late for them.
The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).
The zionists are right. I don’t see any solution to this that doesn’t eventually look like a Zionism transposed to some other location. The historic record here is pretty clear — a stateless Jewish minority is going to be the target of either states looking for a scapegoat or angry mobs taking matters into their own hands. In most Muslim countries, non Muslims are second class citizens at best. So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere. If that’s the case, you need to create a continuous land area in which Jews are given complete control. And you’re now displacing whoever lives there now. It ends up looking almost exactly like Israel except now we’re building in South America or Montana or Wales or something. There aren’t really good answers.
I feel like it is important to point out that however valid this argument may be, making it forever forecloses your ability to criticise Trump, the alt-right and white nationalists. Once you cross this line you lose the ethical and moral ground which allows you to say that white nationalism/ethnonationalism is bad at all. There simply aren't any real arguments for why the Jews need to be protected and get their own ethnostate that don't also apply to white or yellow people beyond blatant ethnic supremacy (that would sound something like "The Jews get to have their own nation because they're God's chosen people and above all others").
And while this is the motte and hence nobody cares that a pseudonymous Zensunni wanderer can't exactly condemn Trump anymore, these concerns become much bigger in the real world where people make political statements tied to their identity. All these public arguments, discussions and comments about what's happening are going to be remembered, and the left is famous for digging into people's past comments in order to discredit them in arguments so this isn't exactly a purely academic concern.
That's not true. E.g. whites are much more numerous. It's not realistic to imagine that whites in the USA could suffer the same fate as Jews in Germany - there's too many of them.
White people are vanishingly small as a percentage of the total population on Earth, so all you're saying is that we just have to wait a bit longer before they can have their own ethnostate? Would you also support Israel ceasing to be an ethnostate once the jewish diaspora population gets a bit bigger? How you slice the salami matters a lot too - do the Boers get to have their own ethnostate, given that they are a tiny minority on the verge of being wiped out and far smaller in population than the jews? I'm struggling to see the actual principle here - "you only get an ethnostate if you could plausibly be wiped out" is a contradictory and self-defeating argument anyway because it means that the moment you have the ethnostate you're protected and hence no longer deserve it... and if the ethnostate DOESN'T protect you, then there's no point tying it to numbers like that.
I think each people group is well served to have at least one country where they are a majority. Whether or not a country exists for the explicit purpose of giving them a majority is pretty much immaterial. E.g. Egypt is not a country formed for the purpose of giving Arabs a state of their own, but it nonetheless functions perfectly well as an Arab-majority country, such that the establishment of an Arab ethnostate is unnecessary. Whites don't need an ethnostate because we already have the thing that an ethnostate would exist to give us. E.g. when white Zimbabweans were a persecuted minority, they had somewhere to flee to that opened the doors for them.
And yes, this does mean I would like the Boers to have their own land - ideally they would have beaten the British and the Orange Free State would have survived. Alas.
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Jews get to have an ethnostate because they’ve been genocided several times. I don’t think that’s identical to other arguments. I’m not worried about other states wanting to have an ethnostate if they want one.
White people have also been genocided several times through history as well (European history is surprisingly brutal). They're still around, but if that's an argument against them getting an ethnostate then it also applies to the jews.
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Honestly when you saw the riots in Paris and the marches and London maybe it isn’t unreasonable to keep France for the French or England for the English.
Personally I thought the Rotherham case was a far greater argument for keeping England for the English. I'm not even going to feign a lack of disgust at people who think protests in favour of Hamas are where the line was crossed as opposed to Rotherham (though to clarify I'm not accusing you of this right now).
Agreed. Rotherham is disgusting. Basically “sure we let them rape white girls because we don’t want to be called racist”
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There is no actual reason to suppose that if every Israeli Jew were granted the right to live in the US or Australia or the Netherlands or someplace, they would be vulnerable to scapegoating or pogroms. Sure, in Saudi they would, but granting Jews the right of return to Australia would not actually make them vulnerable to discrimination- they just wouldn't have their own country.
Australia is an immigration friendly place, but even so 7 million people all at once would be stretching the friendship a bit.
Edit: Also, we did just have a big crowd in Sydney chanting "gas the jews". Such people are an extreme fringe, but can anyone guarantee they will remain a fringe?
That was just an example, you know. No doubt a 1-state solution where the Palestinians are full citizens, backstopped by the CANZUK nations pledging to accept any Israeli Jewish immigrant who applies, would not result in a Jewish genocide(although it might well result in far fewer Jews in a generation as some of the conditions leading to a high Israeli-Jewish birthrate are probably unique to Israel).
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