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.
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
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
ymeskhout 5mo ago·Edited 5mo 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
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
ymeskhout 5mo ago·Edited 5mo 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
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
ymeskhout 5mo 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.
The Haaretz list includes literally zero infants (or children under the age of 4). It includes one child of four years old, two five-year-olds, two six-year-olds, an eight-year-old, one 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, four 12-year-olds, two 13-year-olds, two 14-year-olds, three 15-year-olds, three 16-year-olds, and four 17-year-olds.
There is a filter between civilian, police, soldier, and rescue services. There's a few people listed as civilians with a military rank (one Captain, three Master Sgt., a Cpl., two Sergeant Maj.), and one person marked without a rank but as a Lone Soldier (IDF member without family in the area). Looking through external sources, some of these look to be retired or off-duty, but I can't tell for the remainder.
Of the 1131 names (as of 11/5), 400 have no age listed. Most of those are probably not young children. Most.
There's some possible discussion to be had with someone who wants to engage seriously with the matter, and some deeper analysis available. I just don't see the point doing so with someone that's not taking photographic evidence.
I’m genuinely at a loss trying to understand your position. Is your argument that the half of names and ages cleared for publication are not representative of half of the sample? Why not specify that, and importantly,
why do you believe that? Do you have evidence to believe that they are intentionally withholding the names and ages of under-18s? Or do you believe that someone would read the half and assume a total?
The higher count is a (surprise) twice the value of the half amount I specified, and it’s three weeks old because the original Hamas incursion was four weeks old.
What’s so interesting about this back and forth (beside the fact that either I am embarrassingly missing something obvious or you are aiming for criticism like Hamas aims their rockets) is that we are comparing 2,664 children killed by Israel to the “40 children” figure. Let us suppose that the 40 figure is wrong, and the final count comes to 100. Then my figure (which is based in evidence) did turn out inaccurate, and that will be important to note in the future. Do you think that impacts my point being made? It would be 26x more children, rather than 66x, and the point I am getting across would stand.
Is your argument that the half of names and ages cleared for publication are not representative of half of the sample? Why not specify that, and importantly, why do you believe that?
I think there are actually a pretty sizable number of reasons to suspect that dead children will be identified slower (they won't be in many photo databases, are less likely to have parents or siblings in other cities, may not be fully set up within any database given Kibbitz politics, and in extreme cases bones are easier to damage and dental records are less useful or present), and once identified that they are less likely to have their names released (there are broad norms not just in Israel against sharing the identities of deceased minors without parental permission, in many).
Meanwhile, there are absolutely zero under-3-year-olds (and only one 4-year-old), while there is photographic evidence that I am decidedly not going to link to of multiple dead <1-year-olds.
There are more complex and esoteric issues, but these are the ones that should have been pretty obvious to anyone looking at the data with even a passing familiarity with the situation. Meanwhile, groups such as the lqgist twitter account you link don't bother even to spell out that half of the dataset is missing entirely or missing names.
The higher count is a (surprise) twice the value of the half amount I specified, and it’s three weeks old because the original Hamas incursion was four weeks old.
Someone with any degree of insight might ponder if it would be the slightest bit strange for that number to not have gone up across three weeks, even as the count of casualties on Oct 7 nearly doubled. Might think just the slightest about if there's something of relevance there
Then my figure (which is based in evidence) did turn out inaccurate, and that will be important to note in the future. Do you think that impacts my point being made? It would be 26x more children, rather than 66x, and the point I am getting across would stand.
And there's the punchline.
That is why I'm not going into any more serious analysis of the casualty counts, or comparing to other sources than haaretz. You don't care, and now you've said you don't care. The argument is nothing more than a soldier.
There are discussions I could present on the broader topic you want to make your point -- how much should we trust Gazan casualty counts? What responsibility does Israel have for insufficiently vetting strikes to minimize civilian harm, and Hamas for collocating military caches with civilian infrastructure or refuges? How many, if any, casualties can or should we accept for a valid military objective, and where and who does 'valid' military objectives come from? Where is the breakdown for civilian combatant casualties, and where does the line between combatant self-defense, police or pseudo-military, and terrorism fall? (How do you measure non-combat civilian casualties, which Israel has probably caused more of?)
But there's not really much point if you're not engaging with the most wildly concrete components with any degree of even-handed analysis. And you, specifically, have been following this long enough and in enough detail that I know a lot of the reasons you should be skeptical aren't a surprise.
Do you suggest that Israel use children as human shields, so that they can increase the number of Israeli children killed, in which case it would be proportional.
You're just penalizing Israel for being able to protect their own people.
I'm making a point of saving this for later, in the event I want to fire a nuclear cannon of a reply to people performing apologetics on behalf of the Palestinians.
The only place where I'd even modestly disagree is in claiming that Zionism is justified today, in the sense that America and most of the West are good refuges for the Jews and have large, relatively close-knit communities who aren't at real risk of being pogrommed, current liberal tendencies included. Then again, having a patch of dirt and a flag always helps when asserting yourself, so it's not a major disagreement in the least.
I'm making a point of saving this for later, in the event I want to fire a nuclear cannon of a reply to people performing apologetics on behalf of the Palestinians.
If videos of Hamas beheading Thai workers with a shovel and shooting families in their homes and spitting on dead disfigured naked women isn't enough to move them even a millimeter, you think an article regardless of how well written it is would?
I literally know people who have seen the videos of Hamas doing all that, then distributing sweets, then celebrating it and boasting about it all, with their own motherfucking eyes, and then still claim those videos are an Israeli false flag and Hamas actually wanted to just free Al-Aqsa, which is 100 fucking kilometres away from the Border.
It's absolutely ridiculous. Like how do you even deal with that level of willful ignorance?
That's well beyond the ability of even nukes to solve, you need something like a relativistic kill vehicle to handle that..
I'm talking about the less insane, the people who are broadly sympathetic to the Palestinians as poor oppressed innocent folk being bullied by mean Israel. While I don't expect it to sway all of them, this serves as a spread of buckshot right at the heart of most of the common objections. I'll probably link the Substack post, seems more official than the Motte.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
ymeskhout 5mo ago·Edited 5mo ago
I've said it before that this conflict isn't complicated at all, and anyone with non-room-temperature IQ can grasp the ins and outs within a day or two of reading. Looks like you and a few other readers in the motte are examples of that.
As an ex-Muslim who lives in a Muslim majority country, I think I am very sensitive to how they think, given I used to think like them. It's patently obvious just talking to them that there is just so much, like such a massive nearing blackhole level of density of latent hate for the Jews among even otherwise secular on every other topic Muslims, that I knew that Muslim opinions on Palestine = garbage of the highest order ;unless proven otherwise, is a good prior. You think opinions on a matter could be biased ever? Well, this is an example if there ever was one.
It's not about oppressing Muslims, Muslims "oppress" other Muslims by literal orders of magnitude more for literal orders of magnitude less media coverage and or rage. Compounding into a signal to issue ratio being off by further orders of magnitude.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
f3zinker 5mo ago
that I knew that Muslim opinion on Palestine = garbage of the highest order ;unless proven otherwise, is a good prior.
I second this. My extended family members on whatsapp are posting stuff that makes me embarassed that I share 1/8th of my DNA by direct recent descent with them.
I’ve lived in the gulf for several years of my life and knew a lot of wealthy, well educated Arabs.
They really, really hate Jews. Do you know how I knew? They told me! Completely unprompted, multiples times. Apparently they did 9/11 and are the cause of basically every ill in the Arab world.
All this fancy talk about “settler colonialism” blah blah blah never really convinced me because I saw and heard a ton of direct evidence of really intense Jew hate with my own eyes & ears for an extended period of time.
1/8th of the genetic variance from the human mean I'd hope, unless you consider the sunflowers in the garden extended relatives.
Then again, they likely have better opinions about the conflict..
Funnily enough, despite the trope that Indians are fervent supporters of Israel, I've only seen pro-Palestinian propaganda shared online in my own circles, the most ludicrous being a claim by a girl I danced the night away with that the Gazan Ministry of Education shut down schools because "all the children had been killed" lmao. Well, I wasn't attracted to her at the time for her brains..
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
self_made_human 5mo ago
1/8th of the genetic variance from the human mean I'd hope, unless you consider the sunflowers in the garden extended relatives.
I meant identity by descent rather than identity by state. Identity by descent only looks at segments that have not undergone recombination since they were in the most recent common ancestor, and that is 1/8 between a person and their cousins in expectation.
the most ludicrous being a claim by a girl I danced the night away with that the Gazan Ministry of Education shut down schools because "all the children had been killed" lmao
And this person gets a vote... Given the extreme young age of Gazans, we'd need something like 1 million targeted deaths wiping out half the population of Gaza for it to be even possible for this to be true.
I've also been seeing almost 100% pro-Palestinian propaganda in my personal life apart from the actual Israeli people I know, one of whom has a friend whose aunt and uncle went missing after the attack, he said he hoped they were dead because the alternative was that they were hostages...
The most I can say about it is that at least the stuff I get to see doesn't glorify Hamas, it just selectively reports Israeli attacks while ignoring Hamas completely.
I’m not a progressive, but I do disagree with some of this and sympathize with the position of the Palestinians (not necessarily with any particular faction and certainly not with Hamas). I do also sympathize with present-day Israelis, while thinking the Zionist movement was a bad idea that led to bad outcomes that ought to have been foreseeable to an ethnic group not known (regardless of the reasons) for warm relations with its neighbors, which was the whole impetus for leaving Europe in the first place.
I’m not going to be defending Hamas - I’m more familiar with modern nationalism and the associated brutality in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the surrounding countries (despite the handle, I’m not Polish or Czech (also not Jewish or Arab, FWIW). I would compare Hamas to the Ukrainian OUN-B.
Before WWII, Ukraine was divided between the Second Polish Republic (with a well-deserved reputation for ethnonationalist dickbaggery) and the USSR, which had already completed its (relatively) kind and gentle phase and started cracking down on regional languages, cultural organizations, and education in the Ukraine as elsewhere. So one overlord wanted to forcibly assimilate them, while the other wanted to impose communism and suppress markers of national distinctiveness, and also killed a ton of Ukrainians with terrible economic policy. So I’m sympathetic to the Ukrainian position at that time.
During WWII, and after some bitter infighting, OUN-B became the dominant Ukrainian faction in Galicia-Volhynia after overcoming the relatively moderate OUN-A. They allied with the Nazis and actively participated in the Holocaust in the area, which involved rounding up Jews and shooting them rather than transport to camps as in more westerly areas. With the Soviet advance, they deserted the Germans with their weapons and extensive experience with genocidal massacres and proceeded to ethnically cleanse the Poles from the region, with about 40,000 Poles killed in the fighting.
So the OUN-B were the actual worst. They committed atrocities on a much greater scale than anyone in the Israel-Palestine conflict has ever managed. Suppose someone had conducted a valid poll at the time and they had 70% support with local Ukrainians. That would genuinely be bad. But that wouldn’t justify the Polish attempt to forcibly assimilate them and acquire territory through ethnic colonization (most of the Polish population was of long resistance however), nor Soviet attempts to force them into the Soviet Union with all that entailed. Total dickbags can achieve dominance over a movement responding to real injustice.
“The scattered Jewish diaspora suffered unrelenting oppression across millennia virtually anywhere they went” Jews were subject to expulsions and mass violence. I’m willing to believe this was more common and/or severe than with other mercantile minorities (the Armenian diaspora from Poland to India, the medieval Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, the coastal Arab and Persian diasporas), though the people making this argument tend not to have the background knowledge to actually know this (if you are well-informed as to the comparative treatment of pre-modern commercial minorities and the Jews did have it distinctly the worst, this is not meant as a criticism of you).
Now consider the Jews of the former Poland-Lithuania. In interwar Europe, 5.5 million Jews lived in former Polish-Lithuanian territory (3 million in the Second Polish Republic, 2.5 in the Soviet Union), making up about a third of all Jews. During most of the period, they had lived there by invitation and served as a middle-man minority. They had communal self-government, the standard package of obnoxious religious limitations on tolerated minorities (e.g., requiring permission (and often a bribe) to build or repair synagogues), and an intermediate position in the hierarchy between landowning nobles and peasants. Their religion was denigrated and subject to official restrictions. But overall, they had better corporate privileges than peasants, who made up about 90% of the population (due to negotiation based on their economic usefulness). I do not consider these oppressive conditions by the standards of the time. The very reason why there were so many of them was rapid natural expansion under generally favorable conditions. The major massacres occurred in specific wartime or near wartime conditions, such as the Chmielnicki rebellion and after World War I, and were important and horrible but also not constitutive of “unrelenting oppression.”
“The-land-formerly-known-as-Canaan exchanged bloody hands multiple times” This is not a distinctive feature of the region, and would not normally be taken as supportive of ethnic-based in migration in other circumstances (e.g., if Poles organized to move to Germany east of the Elbe because it was Slavic until the late Middle Ages and the land has changed hands a number of times, I think that would be ridiculous). Egypt and the rest of the Levant have similar historical trajectories. Anatolia had an even more dramatic ethnoreligious turnover in the late Middle Ages. Maybe Persia had less, though their language is unrelated to Arabic, so a language shift would have been harder. The bloodiness and hand-changing-quotient or whatever of the region doesn’t strike me as notable or abnormal, and it’s not clear how that would justify a project to create a new ethnic enclave there over the objections of the current occupants at the time.
“the area historically represented the only cogent Jewish political entities to have ever existed.” You may note that the last independent such entity in that region was conquered more than 2 thousand years ago. There were also Jewish ruled states in other locations more recently (most notably the Khanate of Khazaria - one anti-Semitic conspiracy falsely holds that Ashkenazim are descended from them rather than historical Judeans. I always find it odd, because the Khazars were pretty interesting, and I’m not sure what the insult is supposed to be). None of this is either here or there, because again, that was two thousand years ago. Israeli Jews are overwhelming descended from new migrants from the Zionist era. The country was already inhabited. This would be like Greece claiming Sicily.
Regarding the 700,000 of the Nakba. This was half of the local Arab population. It resulted in their dispersal into surrounding countries and to two threatened, difficult to defend enclaves, one of which is slowly being settled by the competing ethnostate. The current bitterness is partially due to these effects, rather than to the absolute number moved.
One notable feature of the Israel-Palestine conflict was the ethnic mix that led to the tension was produced deliberately during the age of nationalism. In many of the other major comparable conflicts (Indian partition, Balkans, former Poland-Lithuanian), the ethnic dispersion pattern was a product of medieval and pre-nationalism modern practices (Muslim invasion of India, Muslim coastal trade, migration of orthodox Serbs into Bosnia and Croatia to escape the Ottomans, city formation by transplanted ethnic groups different from surrounding rural peoples) that bore bitter fruit only under new conditions of nationalism and democracy (which made ethnic cleansing and/or assimilation very important to ensure control of government). I personally would find the whole situation much more murky if a bunch of Mizrahi formed a majority in a weird patchwork in Israel/Palestine and that was just what we had to work with historically. But the reality was a nationalist movement of primarily Ashkenazim and to a lesser extent Sephardim who actively went way out of their way to create the situation.
Apartheid - I don’t know or care if Israel is an apartheid state. The substance of the complaint has to do with expelling enough of the non-Jewish population to ensure Jewish dominance and actively encouraging further Jewish immigration while limiting non-Jewish immigration. Israel can afford to treat its current Arab citizens decently, partially out of self interest, partially because of their own moral standards, while still slow-slicing the West Bank and creating faits-accompli with settlers. But they aren’t going to take any steps that would allow Arabs to have more than minority power, for reasons that are understandable but also are going to be correctly perceived as hostile by Arabs.
The economy is better in Israel. This is true. After half the Palestinian population was expelled during the initial war. Only about half still live in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza. If millions of Americans moved to, let’s say, Sri Lanka, the GDP per capita would rise dramatically. If we expelled half the Sri Lankans in the ensuing fighting, those who remained would wind up with much better pay than their neighbors in South India. Should they desire this outcome? Would South Indians be jealous of their good fortune?
“Colonization” narrative and “settler-colonialism” - I’m torn on this issue. On the one hand, it’s a struggle over who gets to use the affect-loaded terminology, as with “apartheid,” and shouldn’t matter to the reality of the situation. On the other, I don’t understand how it’s not settler colonialism, unless you choose to define that phenomenon very narrowly. The linked article claims, as somehow being contrary to the colonialism claim, that most Jews there today are descended from 1881-1949 arrivals. Yes. They settled there as part of a concerted nationalist movement despite the area already being populated, and consciously pursued policies to establish Jewish-majority areas and then an overall Jewish majority. One of the major Zionist organizations was literally called the Jewish Colonization Association (now Jewish Charitable Association). Is the distinction supposed to be that they weren’t also the sovereign power during most of the period (as opposed to British settler colonies)?
Western culture, functioning democracy aspects - in most respects I greatly prefer Israeli culture to Palestinian or other Arab cultures of the present day. It’s not clear how this should be read as a benefit to Arabs, since the precondition for the situation was their own displacement and subordination. As with GDP - if you moved millions of Americans to a random third world location and expelled half the locals, leaving an 80% American population, the resulting culture would almost certainly be more western and democratic.
One way to describe the Palestinian reaction here is as violent anti-immigrant vigilantism fueled by racial animus.” Whether the Arabs’ conduct at this stage was good, bad, or otherwise, it seems reasonable to point out that the violence arose in protest to an explicit project to create a “Jewish National Home” where they were already living. I don’t think anyone, including Jews, would accept such a project directed at them.
Objections to Zionism - I object to nationalist projects to retake ancestral land that was not in a continual or at least recent state of contestation, and usually even then. Germany had a much better claim on the Sudetenland in the interwar period than Jews as a group had on Israel/Palestine before Zionism (though they pursued it in the most destructive and dickish way possible). Thus I object to the historical Zionism that produced Israel on the same grounds I object to the Czech claim on the Sudetenland, the Polish claim on what is now western Poland (but not on Vilnius, which was reasonable), maximally expansionist claims by Balkan countries, etc. To be fair to the nationalists of the 1800’s and 1900’s, they were looking forward and not backward at the rivers of blood that would be spilled to create all the new national homes purged of electorally threatening proportions of minorities (I am very much not only talking about Israel here).
I object to the arguments that the Jews are entitled to a state. I don’t think diasporas are entitled to a state, especially not when it involves displacing a dense (by historical standards) pre-existing population. I have much less objection if the people displaced are low-density farmer-hunters or the like, not because their displacement is justified (I think it wasn’t), but because those people were totally screwed anyway and Jews are no worse than Brits or Dutch for this. So Jewish subset of what became Argentina would be about the same level of objectionable as actual Argentina, or the U.S., or any of the Latin American countries. (All assuming it was practical to pull this off).
Persistent Palestinian grievances - I think anger over the initial colonization and the expulsion are still valid. Palestinians are either dispersed when there were not before, living as a minority where they were the majority until very recently and where they were displaced as a consequence of a concerted plan to establish a foreign ethnic enclave, or living in one of two non-contiguous statelets. In a period of 70 years, they went from being the overwhelming majority of the population in the whole territory to being in a worse position than the Irish after 800 years of British rule. In addition, their position is still actively eroding due to slow settlement of the West Bank.
Displaced people elsewhere - depends on the circumstances. Numerous peoples (almost all Amerindians, the remnants of pre-Chinese people south of the Yangtze, etc.) have or had it much worse. Much of the ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe has been horrible, even if you ignore the Holocaust, which is the single worst one that was actually carried out. Land grievances can go away when most people who care die off (East Germans, aided by Germany having a great economy), when the overall exchange has some degree of balance, the new status quo is tolerable, and the leadership are committed to maintaining the status quo (that time the whole country of Poland shifted to the left), when the contending groups merge (Bulgars and Bulgarian Slavs - this tends to take hundreds of years), etc.
This highlights the difference between a deontological vs consequential framework. Using an inverse categorical imperative, I have a hard time pin pointing exactly what actions Israel has done that I would forbid everywhere and that would have changed the outcome. I admit that in total the actions of the Israelis has caused grief in the region. I don't see a way out without an atrocity on the part of Israel or Hamas. Several of Israel's individual actions are bad, but the substantive, broad strokes actions that created the bulk of the mess seem ethical to me.
Regardless of what Jews called their organization (at a time when "Colonialism" was an acceptable activity, and therefore calling it that might have been propaganda to make their actions appealing to Euopeans), the majority of Jews came as refugees. They had a real, genuine, rational fear for their lives in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. They don't have anywhere they could conceivably go back to. Jews have always lived on "other people's land."
Let's play alternative Earth. Groups of Indigenous people in South America are under severe persecution by their governments. Simultaneously, the Native American lobby in the USA is able to convince the Federal Government to fast track immigration for these persecuted refugees. Both refugees and locals buy large swaths of Wyoming over several dozen years through legal and fair transactions. Several thousand white Americans lost their homes and were evicted as their landlords sold their houses out from under them, but they were able to move to other parts of Wyoming or the US. These people were upset and anti-Native American sentiment increased.
Gradually the number of South American refugees outnumber the local Wyoming Native American population 10:1, and achieve parity with the white Wyoming population. The local Wyoming Native American population mostly does not mind, and is happy to bond with the newcomers over shared history and goals.
Fifty years later, the US Federal Government decides Manifest Destiny was a bad thing with terrible consequences. Therefore, they are reducing their territory to just the original 13 States. Every other state is going to need to self-govern. They want to do this with the least amount of bloodshed, and the case of Wyoming poses a problem. The Federal Government is aware that the white population of Wyoming hates the natives, and left to their own devices without US Marshals keeping the peace, a massacre will likely happen. Therefore, the Federal Government performs one last act, splitting up Wyoming into two seperate States. The Native Americans agree to the deal, the Whites attack the Native Americans once the Federal Government exits. Astoundingly, Native Americans win, and even take over more territory than was allocated to them by the Federal Government.
Which parts of this process would you object to? Which specific action would you universally outlaw?
The analogy you set up differs in important respects from the Israel-Palestine situation. Notably, the Ottomans repeatedly refused mass Jewish immigration to the region, which continued due to their limited state capacity. The temporary period of imperial promotion of Zionism occurred during the British Mandate, which would be more like China taking temporary control of the western United States following WWIII and initially encouraging the foreign immigration before reversing course when the policy provokes a rebellion.
Again, the bad situation arose from the settlement and the whole project. By the 1940’s, partition was a reasonable least-bad option.
The original sin (which isn’t a real thing) was setting up a new ethnic enclave in inhabited territory with ethnonationalist aims. It’s creating a Bosnia/Lebanon/Syria/Kresy-type situation where there didn’t need to be one.
Edit: But yes, that was a crucial contributing factor, and I think that large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe is a potential catastrophe (due to mission creep on the part of immigrants as they gain relative power)
I sympathize with the position of the Ashkenazim during the age of democracy and nationalism. The new ideologies screwed over ethnic minorities everywhere by creating strong incentives to expel or forcibly assimilate them for security reasons. This tended to cause bloody chaos in areas like Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Levant. The Ashkenazim were unusual but not unique in being numerous but thinly dispersed without a large contiguous territory due to their niche in the pre-nationalist order.
The initial settlers weren’t refugees, and the later absorption of pogrom refugees depended on the settlements and international organizations previously established. People don’t like accepting refugees anyway, much less people specifically organizing to establish a de novo ethnic enclave on their territory who claim entitlement to the whole area based on their religion that you don’t share. I wouldn’t accept that. I know Israelis wouldn’t accept it. Would you accept it?
The Ashkenazim had reasonable security concerns in Eastern Europe. As with many other Eastern European group, including Poles, Germans, Czech, Ukrainians, Croatians, Serbs, Greeks, Turks, etc., this led them to take steps that ultimately resulted in wide-scale bloodshed and ethnic cleansing. They wanted land, so they took it using the means at hand, current residents be damned. In the run up to independence they consciously imported at many Jews as possible to ensure electoral dominance - by that point it would have been suicidal not to, but only because of the situation that Zionism itself had created.
This doesn’t distinguish them that much from other peoples. Other successful land seizures with partial or complete ethnic cleansing occurred in the new western Poland, the Kresy, the Sudetenland, Vilnius, Galicia-Volhynia, etc.
Now that I'm near my computer I am more confident that I can reject the idea that all the Jewish immigration during the Ottoman empire were Zionist settlers, but rather the majority were still refugees during this era.
The First Aliyah was assisted and funded by Zionists, but as Wikipedia states:
Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine from Eastern Europe occurred as part of mass emigrations of approximately 2.5 million people[12] that took place towards the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. A rapid increase in population had created economic problems that affected Jewish societies in the Pale of Settlement in Russia, Galicia, and Romania.[7]
Persecution of Jews in Russia was also a factor. In 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated, and the authorities blamed the Jews for the assassination. Consequently, in addition to the May Laws, major anti-Jewish pogroms swept the Pale of Settlement. A movement called Hibbat Zion (love of Zion) spread across the Pale (helped by Leon Pinsker's pamphlet Auto-Emancipation), as did the similar Bilu movement. Both movements encouraged Jews to emigrate to Ottoman Palestine.[citation needed]
Meanwhile, a large number of other Jews in the Ottoman Empire, primarily Yemen, moved to Ottoman Palestine at the same time.
The Second Aliyah was also driven by widespread emigration from Eastern Europe. Two million Jews emigrated, only twenty thousand went to Ottoman Palestine. There were many pogroms at this time, the most well-known being the Kishinev massacre.
The Third-Fifth took place during British rule, so I don't know if I need to keep going to make my point.
If I amended my above scenario to state "Some indigenous groups in less hostile South American countries helped pay for these people's flight to Wyoming, because they were one day hoping for a Native American State" does that substantially change the morality of these people's flight to Wyoming?
I’m having trouble finding too much information on the demographic history with high enough granularity to interpret. I don’t have expertise here, to say the least, and it’s very possible my views would move toward yours if I were informed in more detail. Regarding the first Aliyah, the Bilu do seem to have had Zionist ideology in the modern and (to me) objectionable sense David Engel’s book Zionism describes them as refugees, but neither that book nor the Wikipedia articles goes into much detail on composition. Currently trying to read some very poorly-edited books on the history of Hamas (as in, clearly written by non-native speakers and Routledge didn’t feel the need to provide good editors I guess) - will need to find something good on the relevant demographic history next.
Internal movement of Yemeni Jews, assuming it was legal under the Ottoman framework, doesn’t particularly bother me, even if it happened to have bad effects later (not claiming that it did). Supposing that the Yemeni movements did have net negative effects - I would compare that to the forces that led to ethnic town-country differences in Eastern Europe that ultimately led to so much violence, where the process is less worthy of blame because the bad outcome wasn’t reasonably foreseeable at the time.
The Second Aliyah seems to have been in response to the Russian Revolution. It seems most of the refugees went elsewhere as you said. To the extent that in-migration at this stage was guided or motivated by Zionism, I think that’s blameworthy (not in each individual case) for the same reason that I’d disapprove of the Russian Mennonites engaging in Mennonite-homeland-ism at the same time for the same reasons.
The third and onward occurred after the Balfour declaration - at that point I blame the British and those Zionists who had laid the groundwork for the declaration. To my understanding, this early stage of British rule is what created the conditions that underlie the current situation (e.g., Engels claims, IIRC, that the Yishuv didn’t realistically foresee a Jewish-majority anything until the 30’s).
With regard to the South America analogy, if I’m following correctly the difference is that an indigenous diaspora is now organizing and financing the enclave-formation rather than it being refugee-driven? I think that’s morally worse overall (because I’m less forgiving of wrongdoing not done out of desperation), with more of the wrongdoing shifted from the refugees to their backers.
As with GDP - if you moved millions of Americans to a random third world location and expelled half the locals, leaving an 80% American population, the resulting culture would almost certainly be more western and democratic.
I would happily volunteer all of India, but there's so damn many of us that deporting merely 650 million people wouldn't achieve the stated goal.
Well, I suppose if my most useful routes for immigration to the States are blocked, I can't complain..
As you can see I only advocate for sensible, well thought out policies after a great deal of consideration instead of occasionally making obvious jokes!
I mostly came to the same conclusions as you after delving into the history, but there are a few Palestinian grievances that I think need more emphasis:
The land matters so much because the Palestinians don't have anywhere to go. No one wants them. The descendants of Palestinian refugees who fled to Lebanon in 1948 still don't have Lebanese citizenship. See also this Matthew Yglesias article on Right of Return.
Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is a big deal. Many religious Zionists consider the ban on Jewish prayer a pragmatic and temporary measure, and that as soon as the political situation cools down and/or messiah comes the Al-Aqsa Mosque will be torn down and the Third Temple rebuilt. This is a pretty big spiritual threat. No one wants to explain to Allah at the last judgement why they let the third holiest site on the planet be destroyed.
as soon as the political situation cools down and/or messiah comes the Al-Aqsa Mosque will be torn down and the Third Temple rebuilt
Is uniting the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia, watching Sunni and Shi'a standing shoulder to shoulder with Ahmadiyya is your goal, then I can't think of a better way to achieve it than blowing up the Al-Aqsa. Well, other than nuking Kaaba itself.
Of course israel would first ask for the hostages, in exchange for not bulldozing Al-Aqsa. Palestinians and their supporters need to understand that all their kicking and screaming and butchering ultimately means nothing, achieves nothing, and that they are the weak horse. Militarily and spiritually.
It’s just a building, nothing compared to the thousands of deaths on both sides we are contemplating. And persons excluded, stone for stone, they can say it’s revenge for the buddhas of Bamyan. Perhaps buddha would not have approved, but he wasn’t a building.
This is because Palestinian refugees are an utter ballache for any country nearby who might otherwise recognize them as co-ethnics.
They've apparently caused a great deal of problems in Jordan, and Egypt, which struggles with militant Islamism already, doesn't seem to want them.
Hmm, I wonder why that's the case, when most Jews barring the odd hardliners who refuse to serve in the military and reproduce like rabbits are accepted by the Israelis, and even then most of them are already there..
You're right, I did not but should have addressed the Palestinian right of return issue. Yglesias' article highlights one of the core tensions I touched upon though. Countries regularly accomodate refugees and mass migrations, like how Turkey (population 85M) currently has 3.3M Syrian refugees in what is functionally permanent status. If Turkey can do that within about a decade, what exactly are the practical barriers for big alleged supporters (Egypt 100M, Saudi Arabia 35M, Algeria 43M, Iran 83M, etc) of the Palestinian cause to open their borders to the ~5M or so Gaza/WB? Hell, or even the 14M total worldwide?
That's why this conflict makes no sense if you only consider the material consequences. Yes, losing your grandpa's land sucks, but that doesn't warrant a multi-generational vendetta. Yes, the Arab governments shed tears for the plight of the Palestinians, but they don't want them around for some reason. None of this makes sense unless you incorporate the ideological component that needs Palestinians to remain where they are and play the role of the downtrodden to maintain the jihadi casus belli against the Jews. This is what makes this conflict so perverse, so many people are just pawns.
Regarding the Temple Mount, I agree that it's a really big deal for some people. It's just really difficult for me to give a shit about people's religious fanaticism. I basically tried to give it as much play as possible when I discussed it in my post, but ultimately as an atheist I just think it's such a fucking stupid hill to die on (heh). The conflict doesn't make sense without this religious component of course.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
ymeskhout 5mo ago
If Turkey can do that within about a decade, what exactly are the practical barriers for big alleged supporters (Egypt 100M, Saudi Arabia 35M, Algeria 43M, Iran 83M, etc) of the Palestinian cause to open their borders to the ~5M or so Gaza/WB? Hell, or even the 14M total worldwide?
The biggest practical barrier is that a lot of Palestinians want to move back to Palestine and to punish Israel for kicking them out. Imagine Florida Cubans that aren't just willing to vote for the president that promises tougher sanctions on Cuba or to take part in CIA-sponsored invasions, but are actively turning Miami into an autonomous zone, keeping US authorities out of it and hijacking USCG boats to build their own invasion fleet.
Regarding the Temple Mount, I agree that it's a really big deal for some people. It's just really difficult for me to give a shit about people's religious fanaticism.
The trouble is that you and I not giving a shit doesn't stop the Jews and Palestinians from giving a shit -- the conflict would still be pretty intractable without the burning need both groups feel to possess this particular piece of dirt for strictly religious fanatical reasons, but that is indeed the feature that moves it from 'intractable but could be solved by not giving a shit about fanatics' (see 'the Balkans') to 'not solvable at all in any world where you can't genocide or deport ~everyone from one or the other side'.
I agree! We can't control how much other people give a shit about something. What is within our control is how much support we choose to give to other causes, and my post was largely addressing support for Palestine.
I'm close enough to a couple of Israelis to speak frankly to them about this stuff too -- and there's exactly the same chance that they would give up (or even partition) Jerusalem, for much the same reasons as the Muslims.
"A pox on both their houses" is actually a position that recent discourse has largely moved me in the direction of -- but you seem to be making a sort of isolated demand for lack of religious fanaticism on this point?
How is the rigor isolated? I know there's fanaticism on both sides, but the Israeli side is demonstrably much better at keeping their shit reined in. They have Al-Aqsa under occupation and yet they're still willing to dole out what seem like significant concessions to the Muslims.
They have Al-Aqsa under occupation and yet they're still willing to dole out what seem like significant concessions to the Muslims.
Concessions that don't involve giving up control of any part of Jerusalem under any circumstances!
Like, do you really think that Israel would be cool with some other country controlling the Temple Mount, so long as they mostly let Jews visit? (unless of course they don't feel like it at some point)
I don't know what Israel's stance on an "internationalized" or "foreign-administered" Temple Mount would be, it would depend on the specific parameters. My guess would be they would be very much against it unless whatever body/country administers it has a solid reputation for taking Jewish interests to the site seriously. If a Jewish ethnostate is willing to take the step of banning Jewish prayer at the Mount, I guess that any other country (read non-Jewish ethnostate) would be willing to take even more concessions, especially when the opposite side of the pressure risks making them the target of a Jihadi holy war.
Or is it simply advocating for a coexisting independent Palestine in both the West Bank (river) and Gaza (sea)
I think "from ... to" would imply a continuous state, so at the best this is asking for a corridor.
Realistically, it is a call for replacing all of Israel with a Palestinian state, in which Jews might or might not be safe (realistically the latter).
Slogans need to be evaluated in a cultural context. When Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote "Deutschland ueber alles", it was very possible that he meant that as a call to create a German nation state. However, this slogan had a very different interpretation when some Germans tried to conquer the world. Anyone singing that post-1945 can hardly claim that he means the innocent interpretation and not a call for world conquest.
Likewise, Hamas has their interpretation for what "the river to the sea" means, and has recently focused a lot of attention on the Palestinian cause with their atrocities. Using that slogan only weeks after their bloodbath and claiming that one means the goal of a state where Jews and Palestinians live in peace and friendship is basically asking to be excused on grounds of insanity.
Other than that, I mostly share your assessment. I would perhaps have emphasized a bit more how the far-right-coalition of Netanyahu with it's policy of slowly annexing the West Bank was not helping the peace process or him previously not focusing on Hamas so that that they would form a counterweight to the PLO/Fatah has now spectacularly backfired, but this is mostly because I hold Western countries like Israel to a higher standard (with great GDP comes great responsibility, and all that). I would prefer to live in Bibi's Israel to living in a Palestine run by the likes of Hamas any day of the week.
I really enjoy your podcast, btw. Keep up the good work!
Thanks! I agree with your framework for how to analyze slogans. I wrote a while ago about dog whistles and argued: "a good rule to follow is that the less ambiguous a statement is, the less likely it is a dog whistle. To me, a phrase referencing "Final Solution" is deeply ambiguous and can mean anything from total human extinction to the transcendence victory of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Dog whistles by definition require plausible deniability, and there is more than enough in that phrase to act as a credible dog whistle."
When someone is fully aware of their statement's ambiguity yet insists on using it anyways, I think it's fair to accuse them of intentionally deploying a dog whistle.
This is correct. 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). I disagree with ethnostate policies, but support anyone's right to found one.
No, I would object to anyone's expulsion from a place they're already established in. I would be fine with that kind of expulsion if it was the result of something they previously agreed to (signing something when they arrive at the Snow Crash enclave). If anyone wants to start an ethnostate on the ocean, or if they secure private property for the purpose of excluding others, I don't have a problem with that.
I must thank you for this post. Because, despite stating my indifference I feel like I've been driven by the past few weeks -and negative partisanship- into becoming more sympathetic towards Israel than ever before.
Some of the stuff I'm seeing people do is just absolutely ridiculous and some of the arguments - e.g. about what counts as a war crime, a term that seems to have lost all meaning - are really strange when you look at them. There are also solutions so absurd as to seem malicious (e.g. Marc Lamont Hill suggesting Israel let in Gazans into Isarel) and ones that seem to live on another planet where excruciating dilemmas like the ones Israel faces aren't a concern. I think, more than anything, I've been swayed by annoyance by the absolute lack of good plans suggested amongst people so certain they can demonize people with actual skin in the game.
I've never cared about this issue (the Jews weren't really a live issue in my country, so it was mostly wry hints about "those people" if it ever came up) until I became an atheist and then I made it a point to disdain the entire thing as a fascination of Arabophilic African Muslims who cared more about foreigners than their own (I essentially went through a hotep phase) but the more I get into the debate on this the more I really do think there's something to the claim that people really do treat Israel differently.
Anyways, long way to say: thank you for giving me a post-hoc rationalization for my emotional reaction :).
I ran across that Lamont Hill clip too and it's so insane how pathetically misinformed people are on this issue. My friend sent me a 280 page Amnesty International report lamenting the injustices of Israel's security barriers and literally not once does the report ever say anything about the proud tradition of using children as suicide bombers. I pointed this out and she backpedaled and sort-of-maybe-tried to argue that the civil right infringements of a security screening might be too high a price to pay to reduce suicide bombings. Just absolutely clueless. I have yet to come across any semblance of a plan for how to deal with Hamas, except what basically amounts to assuming the problem away.
I felt a similar kind of ambient aversion to the topic, being an Arab immigrant and then steeped within lefty activist circles. Even though I didn't think about the issue much, the thought of expressing any sort of affiliation with Israel would've been absolutely unthinkable to me.
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Notes -
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.
The Haaretz list includes literally zero infants (or children under the age of 4). It includes one child of four years old, two five-year-olds, two six-year-olds, an eight-year-old, one 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, four 12-year-olds, two 13-year-olds, two 14-year-olds, three 15-year-olds, three 16-year-olds, and four 17-year-olds.
There is a filter between civilian, police, soldier, and rescue services. There's a few people listed as civilians with a military rank (one Captain, three Master Sgt., a Cpl., two Sergeant Maj.), and one person marked without a rank but as a Lone Soldier (IDF member without family in the area). Looking through external sources, some of these look to be retired or off-duty, but I can't tell for the remainder.
Of the 1131 names (as of 11/5), 400 have no age listed. Most of those are probably not young children. Most.
There's some possible discussion to be had with someone who wants to engage seriously with the matter, and some deeper analysis available. I just don't see the point doing so with someone that's not taking photographic evidence.
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I’m genuinely at a loss trying to understand your position. Is your argument that the half of names and ages cleared for publication are not representative of half of the sample? Why not specify that, and importantly, why do you believe that? Do you have evidence to believe that they are intentionally withholding the names and ages of under-18s? Or do you believe that someone would read the half and assume a total?
The higher count is a (surprise) twice the value of the half amount I specified, and it’s three weeks old because the original Hamas incursion was four weeks old.
What’s so interesting about this back and forth (beside the fact that either I am embarrassingly missing something obvious or you are aiming for criticism like Hamas aims their rockets) is that we are comparing 2,664 children killed by Israel to the “40 children” figure. Let us suppose that the 40 figure is wrong, and the final count comes to 100. Then my figure (which is based in evidence) did turn out inaccurate, and that will be important to note in the future. Do you think that impacts my point being made? It would be 26x more children, rather than 66x, and the point I am getting across would stand.
I think there are actually a pretty sizable number of reasons to suspect that dead children will be identified slower (they won't be in many photo databases, are less likely to have parents or siblings in other cities, may not be fully set up within any database given Kibbitz politics, and in extreme cases bones are easier to damage and dental records are less useful or present), and once identified that they are less likely to have their names released (there are broad norms not just in Israel against sharing the identities of deceased minors without parental permission, in many).
Meanwhile, there are absolutely zero under-3-year-olds (and only one 4-year-old), while there is photographic evidence that I am decidedly not going to link to of multiple dead <1-year-olds.
There are more complex and esoteric issues, but these are the ones that should have been pretty obvious to anyone looking at the data with even a passing familiarity with the situation. Meanwhile, groups such as the lqgist twitter account you link don't bother even to spell out that half of the dataset is missing entirely or missing names.
Someone with any degree of insight might ponder if it would be the slightest bit strange for that number to not have gone up across three weeks, even as the count of casualties on Oct 7 nearly doubled. Might think just the slightest about if there's something of relevance there
And there's the punchline.
That is why I'm not going into any more serious analysis of the casualty counts, or comparing to other sources than haaretz. You don't care, and now you've said you don't care. The argument is nothing more than a soldier.
There are discussions I could present on the broader topic you want to make your point -- how much should we trust Gazan casualty counts? What responsibility does Israel have for insufficiently vetting strikes to minimize civilian harm, and Hamas for collocating military caches with civilian infrastructure or refuges? How many, if any, casualties can or should we accept for a valid military objective, and where and who does 'valid' military objectives come from? Where is the breakdown for civilian combatant casualties, and where does the line between combatant self-defense, police or pseudo-military, and terrorism fall? (How do you measure non-combat civilian casualties, which Israel has probably caused more of?)
But there's not really much point if you're not engaging with the most wildly concrete components with any degree of even-handed analysis. And you, specifically, have been following this long enough and in enough detail that I know a lot of the reasons you should be skeptical aren't a surprise.
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Do you suggest that Israel use children as human shields, so that they can increase the number of Israeli children killed, in which case it would be proportional.
You're just penalizing Israel for being able to protect their own people.
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Long, but great read. You should post this on Substack.
Already did https://ymeskhout.substack.com/p/the-jewish-conspiracy-to-change-my
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I know an AAQC when I see one..
I'm making a point of saving this for later, in the event I want to fire a nuclear cannon of a reply to people performing apologetics on behalf of the Palestinians.
The only place where I'd even modestly disagree is in claiming that Zionism is justified today, in the sense that America and most of the West are good refuges for the Jews and have large, relatively close-knit communities who aren't at real risk of being pogrommed, current liberal tendencies included. Then again, having a patch of dirt and a flag always helps when asserting yourself, so it's not a major disagreement in the least.
If videos of Hamas beheading Thai workers with a shovel and shooting families in their homes and spitting on dead disfigured naked women isn't enough to move them even a millimeter, you think an article regardless of how well written it is would?
I literally know people who have seen the videos of Hamas doing all that, then distributing sweets, then celebrating it and boasting about it all, with their own motherfucking eyes, and then still claim those videos are an Israeli false flag and Hamas actually wanted to just free Al-Aqsa, which is 100 fucking kilometres away from the Border.
It's absolutely ridiculous. Like how do you even deal with that level of willful ignorance?
That's well beyond the ability of even nukes to solve, you need something like a relativistic kill vehicle to handle that..
I'm talking about the less insane, the people who are broadly sympathetic to the Palestinians as poor oppressed innocent folk being bullied by mean Israel. While I don't expect it to sway all of them, this serves as a spread of buckshot right at the heart of most of the common objections. I'll probably link the Substack post, seems more official than the Motte.
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I've said it before that this conflict isn't complicated at all, and anyone with non-room-temperature IQ can grasp the ins and outs within a day or two of reading. Looks like you and a few other readers in the motte are examples of that.
As an ex-Muslim who lives in a Muslim majority country, I think I am very sensitive to how they think, given I used to think like them. It's patently obvious just talking to them that there is just so much, like such a massive nearing blackhole level of density of latent hate for the Jews among even otherwise secular on every other topic Muslims, that I knew that Muslim opinions on Palestine = garbage of the highest order ;unless proven otherwise, is a good prior. You think opinions on a matter could be biased ever? Well, this is an example if there ever was one.
It's not about oppressing Muslims, Muslims "oppress" other Muslims by literal orders of magnitude more for literal orders of magnitude less media coverage and or rage. Compounding into a signal to issue ratio being off by further orders of magnitude.
Ofcourse the media is the enemy of the people is also a good prior. https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/17jlok3/news_attention_to_deadly_conflicts_since_year/
I second this. My extended family members on whatsapp are posting stuff that makes me embarassed that I share 1/8th of my DNA by direct recent descent with them.
I’ve lived in the gulf for several years of my life and knew a lot of wealthy, well educated Arabs.
They really, really hate Jews. Do you know how I knew? They told me! Completely unprompted, multiples times. Apparently they did 9/11 and are the cause of basically every ill in the Arab world.
All this fancy talk about “settler colonialism” blah blah blah never really convinced me because I saw and heard a ton of direct evidence of really intense Jew hate with my own eyes & ears for an extended period of time.
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1/8th of the genetic variance from the human mean I'd hope, unless you consider the sunflowers in the garden extended relatives.
Then again, they likely have better opinions about the conflict..
Funnily enough, despite the trope that Indians are fervent supporters of Israel, I've only seen pro-Palestinian propaganda shared online in my own circles, the most ludicrous being a claim by a girl I danced the night away with that the Gazan Ministry of Education shut down schools because "all the children had been killed" lmao. Well, I wasn't attracted to her at the time for her brains..
/images/16989370755917175.webp
I meant identity by descent rather than identity by state. Identity by descent only looks at segments that have not undergone recombination since they were in the most recent common ancestor, and that is 1/8 between a person and their cousins in expectation.
And this person gets a vote... Given the extreme young age of Gazans, we'd need something like 1 million targeted deaths wiping out half the population of Gaza for it to be even possible for this to be true.
I've also been seeing almost 100% pro-Palestinian propaganda in my personal life apart from the actual Israeli people I know, one of whom has a friend whose aunt and uncle went missing after the attack, he said he hoped they were dead because the alternative was that they were hostages...
The most I can say about it is that at least the stuff I get to see doesn't glorify Hamas, it just selectively reports Israeli attacks while ignoring Hamas completely.
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I’m not a progressive, but I do disagree with some of this and sympathize with the position of the Palestinians (not necessarily with any particular faction and certainly not with Hamas). I do also sympathize with present-day Israelis, while thinking the Zionist movement was a bad idea that led to bad outcomes that ought to have been foreseeable to an ethnic group not known (regardless of the reasons) for warm relations with its neighbors, which was the whole impetus for leaving Europe in the first place.
I’m not going to be defending Hamas - I’m more familiar with modern nationalism and the associated brutality in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the surrounding countries (despite the handle, I’m not Polish or Czech (also not Jewish or Arab, FWIW). I would compare Hamas to the Ukrainian OUN-B.
Before WWII, Ukraine was divided between the Second Polish Republic (with a well-deserved reputation for ethnonationalist dickbaggery) and the USSR, which had already completed its (relatively) kind and gentle phase and started cracking down on regional languages, cultural organizations, and education in the Ukraine as elsewhere. So one overlord wanted to forcibly assimilate them, while the other wanted to impose communism and suppress markers of national distinctiveness, and also killed a ton of Ukrainians with terrible economic policy. So I’m sympathetic to the Ukrainian position at that time.
During WWII, and after some bitter infighting, OUN-B became the dominant Ukrainian faction in Galicia-Volhynia after overcoming the relatively moderate OUN-A. They allied with the Nazis and actively participated in the Holocaust in the area, which involved rounding up Jews and shooting them rather than transport to camps as in more westerly areas. With the Soviet advance, they deserted the Germans with their weapons and extensive experience with genocidal massacres and proceeded to ethnically cleanse the Poles from the region, with about 40,000 Poles killed in the fighting.
So the OUN-B were the actual worst. They committed atrocities on a much greater scale than anyone in the Israel-Palestine conflict has ever managed. Suppose someone had conducted a valid poll at the time and they had 70% support with local Ukrainians. That would genuinely be bad. But that wouldn’t justify the Polish attempt to forcibly assimilate them and acquire territory through ethnic colonization (most of the Polish population was of long resistance however), nor Soviet attempts to force them into the Soviet Union with all that entailed. Total dickbags can achieve dominance over a movement responding to real injustice.
“The scattered Jewish diaspora suffered unrelenting oppression across millennia virtually anywhere they went” Jews were subject to expulsions and mass violence. I’m willing to believe this was more common and/or severe than with other mercantile minorities (the Armenian diaspora from Poland to India, the medieval Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, the coastal Arab and Persian diasporas), though the people making this argument tend not to have the background knowledge to actually know this (if you are well-informed as to the comparative treatment of pre-modern commercial minorities and the Jews did have it distinctly the worst, this is not meant as a criticism of you).
Now consider the Jews of the former Poland-Lithuania. In interwar Europe, 5.5 million Jews lived in former Polish-Lithuanian territory (3 million in the Second Polish Republic, 2.5 in the Soviet Union), making up about a third of all Jews. During most of the period, they had lived there by invitation and served as a middle-man minority. They had communal self-government, the standard package of obnoxious religious limitations on tolerated minorities (e.g., requiring permission (and often a bribe) to build or repair synagogues), and an intermediate position in the hierarchy between landowning nobles and peasants. Their religion was denigrated and subject to official restrictions. But overall, they had better corporate privileges than peasants, who made up about 90% of the population (due to negotiation based on their economic usefulness). I do not consider these oppressive conditions by the standards of the time. The very reason why there were so many of them was rapid natural expansion under generally favorable conditions. The major massacres occurred in specific wartime or near wartime conditions, such as the Chmielnicki rebellion and after World War I, and were important and horrible but also not constitutive of “unrelenting oppression.”
“The-land-formerly-known-as-Canaan exchanged bloody hands multiple times” This is not a distinctive feature of the region, and would not normally be taken as supportive of ethnic-based in migration in other circumstances (e.g., if Poles organized to move to Germany east of the Elbe because it was Slavic until the late Middle Ages and the land has changed hands a number of times, I think that would be ridiculous). Egypt and the rest of the Levant have similar historical trajectories. Anatolia had an even more dramatic ethnoreligious turnover in the late Middle Ages. Maybe Persia had less, though their language is unrelated to Arabic, so a language shift would have been harder. The bloodiness and hand-changing-quotient or whatever of the region doesn’t strike me as notable or abnormal, and it’s not clear how that would justify a project to create a new ethnic enclave there over the objections of the current occupants at the time.
“the area historically represented the only cogent Jewish political entities to have ever existed.” You may note that the last independent such entity in that region was conquered more than 2 thousand years ago. There were also Jewish ruled states in other locations more recently (most notably the Khanate of Khazaria - one anti-Semitic conspiracy falsely holds that Ashkenazim are descended from them rather than historical Judeans. I always find it odd, because the Khazars were pretty interesting, and I’m not sure what the insult is supposed to be). None of this is either here or there, because again, that was two thousand years ago. Israeli Jews are overwhelming descended from new migrants from the Zionist era. The country was already inhabited. This would be like Greece claiming Sicily.
Regarding the 700,000 of the Nakba. This was half of the local Arab population. It resulted in their dispersal into surrounding countries and to two threatened, difficult to defend enclaves, one of which is slowly being settled by the competing ethnostate. The current bitterness is partially due to these effects, rather than to the absolute number moved.
One notable feature of the Israel-Palestine conflict was the ethnic mix that led to the tension was produced deliberately during the age of nationalism. In many of the other major comparable conflicts (Indian partition, Balkans, former Poland-Lithuanian), the ethnic dispersion pattern was a product of medieval and pre-nationalism modern practices (Muslim invasion of India, Muslim coastal trade, migration of orthodox Serbs into Bosnia and Croatia to escape the Ottomans, city formation by transplanted ethnic groups different from surrounding rural peoples) that bore bitter fruit only under new conditions of nationalism and democracy (which made ethnic cleansing and/or assimilation very important to ensure control of government). I personally would find the whole situation much more murky if a bunch of Mizrahi formed a majority in a weird patchwork in Israel/Palestine and that was just what we had to work with historically. But the reality was a nationalist movement of primarily Ashkenazim and to a lesser extent Sephardim who actively went way out of their way to create the situation.
Apartheid - I don’t know or care if Israel is an apartheid state. The substance of the complaint has to do with expelling enough of the non-Jewish population to ensure Jewish dominance and actively encouraging further Jewish immigration while limiting non-Jewish immigration. Israel can afford to treat its current Arab citizens decently, partially out of self interest, partially because of their own moral standards, while still slow-slicing the West Bank and creating faits-accompli with settlers. But they aren’t going to take any steps that would allow Arabs to have more than minority power, for reasons that are understandable but also are going to be correctly perceived as hostile by Arabs.
The economy is better in Israel. This is true. After half the Palestinian population was expelled during the initial war. Only about half still live in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza. If millions of Americans moved to, let’s say, Sri Lanka, the GDP per capita would rise dramatically. If we expelled half the Sri Lankans in the ensuing fighting, those who remained would wind up with much better pay than their neighbors in South India. Should they desire this outcome? Would South Indians be jealous of their good fortune?
“Colonization” narrative and “settler-colonialism” - I’m torn on this issue. On the one hand, it’s a struggle over who gets to use the affect-loaded terminology, as with “apartheid,” and shouldn’t matter to the reality of the situation. On the other, I don’t understand how it’s not settler colonialism, unless you choose to define that phenomenon very narrowly. The linked article claims, as somehow being contrary to the colonialism claim, that most Jews there today are descended from 1881-1949 arrivals. Yes. They settled there as part of a concerted nationalist movement despite the area already being populated, and consciously pursued policies to establish Jewish-majority areas and then an overall Jewish majority. One of the major Zionist organizations was literally called the Jewish Colonization Association (now Jewish Charitable Association). Is the distinction supposed to be that they weren’t also the sovereign power during most of the period (as opposed to British settler colonies)?
Western culture, functioning democracy aspects - in most respects I greatly prefer Israeli culture to Palestinian or other Arab cultures of the present day. It’s not clear how this should be read as a benefit to Arabs, since the precondition for the situation was their own displacement and subordination. As with GDP - if you moved millions of Americans to a random third world location and expelled half the locals, leaving an 80% American population, the resulting culture would almost certainly be more western and democratic.
One way to describe the Palestinian reaction here is as violent anti-immigrant vigilantism fueled by racial animus.” Whether the Arabs’ conduct at this stage was good, bad, or otherwise, it seems reasonable to point out that the violence arose in protest to an explicit project to create a “Jewish National Home” where they were already living. I don’t think anyone, including Jews, would accept such a project directed at them.
Objections to Zionism - I object to nationalist projects to retake ancestral land that was not in a continual or at least recent state of contestation, and usually even then. Germany had a much better claim on the Sudetenland in the interwar period than Jews as a group had on Israel/Palestine before Zionism (though they pursued it in the most destructive and dickish way possible). Thus I object to the historical Zionism that produced Israel on the same grounds I object to the Czech claim on the Sudetenland, the Polish claim on what is now western Poland (but not on Vilnius, which was reasonable), maximally expansionist claims by Balkan countries, etc. To be fair to the nationalists of the 1800’s and 1900’s, they were looking forward and not backward at the rivers of blood that would be spilled to create all the new national homes purged of electorally threatening proportions of minorities (I am very much not only talking about Israel here).
I object to the arguments that the Jews are entitled to a state. I don’t think diasporas are entitled to a state, especially not when it involves displacing a dense (by historical standards) pre-existing population. I have much less objection if the people displaced are low-density farmer-hunters or the like, not because their displacement is justified (I think it wasn’t), but because those people were totally screwed anyway and Jews are no worse than Brits or Dutch for this. So Jewish subset of what became Argentina would be about the same level of objectionable as actual Argentina, or the U.S., or any of the Latin American countries. (All assuming it was practical to pull this off).
Persistent Palestinian grievances - I think anger over the initial colonization and the expulsion are still valid. Palestinians are either dispersed when there were not before, living as a minority where they were the majority until very recently and where they were displaced as a consequence of a concerted plan to establish a foreign ethnic enclave, or living in one of two non-contiguous statelets. In a period of 70 years, they went from being the overwhelming majority of the population in the whole territory to being in a worse position than the Irish after 800 years of British rule. In addition, their position is still actively eroding due to slow settlement of the West Bank.
Displaced people elsewhere - depends on the circumstances. Numerous peoples (almost all Amerindians, the remnants of pre-Chinese people south of the Yangtze, etc.) have or had it much worse. Much of the ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe has been horrible, even if you ignore the Holocaust, which is the single worst one that was actually carried out. Land grievances can go away when most people who care die off (East Germans, aided by Germany having a great economy), when the overall exchange has some degree of balance, the new status quo is tolerable, and the leadership are committed to maintaining the status quo (that time the whole country of Poland shifted to the left), when the contending groups merge (Bulgars and Bulgarian Slavs - this tends to take hundreds of years), etc.
This highlights the difference between a deontological vs consequential framework. Using an inverse categorical imperative, I have a hard time pin pointing exactly what actions Israel has done that I would forbid everywhere and that would have changed the outcome. I admit that in total the actions of the Israelis has caused grief in the region. I don't see a way out without an atrocity on the part of Israel or Hamas. Several of Israel's individual actions are bad, but the substantive, broad strokes actions that created the bulk of the mess seem ethical to me.
Regardless of what Jews called their organization (at a time when "Colonialism" was an acceptable activity, and therefore calling it that might have been propaganda to make their actions appealing to Euopeans), the majority of Jews came as refugees. They had a real, genuine, rational fear for their lives in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. They don't have anywhere they could conceivably go back to. Jews have always lived on "other people's land."
Let's play alternative Earth. Groups of Indigenous people in South America are under severe persecution by their governments. Simultaneously, the Native American lobby in the USA is able to convince the Federal Government to fast track immigration for these persecuted refugees. Both refugees and locals buy large swaths of Wyoming over several dozen years through legal and fair transactions. Several thousand white Americans lost their homes and were evicted as their landlords sold their houses out from under them, but they were able to move to other parts of Wyoming or the US. These people were upset and anti-Native American sentiment increased.
Gradually the number of South American refugees outnumber the local Wyoming Native American population 10:1, and achieve parity with the white Wyoming population. The local Wyoming Native American population mostly does not mind, and is happy to bond with the newcomers over shared history and goals.
Fifty years later, the US Federal Government decides Manifest Destiny was a bad thing with terrible consequences. Therefore, they are reducing their territory to just the original 13 States. Every other state is going to need to self-govern. They want to do this with the least amount of bloodshed, and the case of Wyoming poses a problem. The Federal Government is aware that the white population of Wyoming hates the natives, and left to their own devices without US Marshals keeping the peace, a massacre will likely happen. Therefore, the Federal Government performs one last act, splitting up Wyoming into two seperate States. The Native Americans agree to the deal, the Whites attack the Native Americans once the Federal Government exits. Astoundingly, Native Americans win, and even take over more territory than was allocated to them by the Federal Government.
Which parts of this process would you object to? Which specific action would you universally outlaw?
The analogy you set up differs in important respects from the Israel-Palestine situation. Notably, the Ottomans repeatedly refused mass Jewish immigration to the region, which continued due to their limited state capacity. The temporary period of imperial promotion of Zionism occurred during the British Mandate, which would be more like China taking temporary control of the western United States following WWIII and initially encouraging the foreign immigration before reversing course when the policy provokes a rebellion.
Again, the bad situation arose from the settlement and the whole project. By the 1940’s, partition was a reasonable least-bad option.
So the original sin is illegal immigration and porous borders, if we can use such terms when discussing the Ottoman Empire?
The original sin (which isn’t a real thing) was setting up a new ethnic enclave in inhabited territory with ethnonationalist aims. It’s creating a Bosnia/Lebanon/Syria/Kresy-type situation where there didn’t need to be one.
Edit: But yes, that was a crucial contributing factor, and I think that large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe is a potential catastrophe (due to mission creep on the part of immigrants as they gain relative power)
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I sympathize with the position of the Ashkenazim during the age of democracy and nationalism. The new ideologies screwed over ethnic minorities everywhere by creating strong incentives to expel or forcibly assimilate them for security reasons. This tended to cause bloody chaos in areas like Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Levant. The Ashkenazim were unusual but not unique in being numerous but thinly dispersed without a large contiguous territory due to their niche in the pre-nationalist order.
The initial settlers weren’t refugees, and the later absorption of pogrom refugees depended on the settlements and international organizations previously established. People don’t like accepting refugees anyway, much less people specifically organizing to establish a de novo ethnic enclave on their territory who claim entitlement to the whole area based on their religion that you don’t share. I wouldn’t accept that. I know Israelis wouldn’t accept it. Would you accept it?
The Ashkenazim had reasonable security concerns in Eastern Europe. As with many other Eastern European group, including Poles, Germans, Czech, Ukrainians, Croatians, Serbs, Greeks, Turks, etc., this led them to take steps that ultimately resulted in wide-scale bloodshed and ethnic cleansing. They wanted land, so they took it using the means at hand, current residents be damned. In the run up to independence they consciously imported at many Jews as possible to ensure electoral dominance - by that point it would have been suicidal not to, but only because of the situation that Zionism itself had created.
This doesn’t distinguish them that much from other peoples. Other successful land seizures with partial or complete ethnic cleansing occurred in the new western Poland, the Kresy, the Sudetenland, Vilnius, Galicia-Volhynia, etc.
Now that I'm near my computer I am more confident that I can reject the idea that all the Jewish immigration during the Ottoman empire were Zionist settlers, but rather the majority were still refugees during this era.
The First Aliyah was assisted and funded by Zionists, but as Wikipedia states:
Meanwhile, a large number of other Jews in the Ottoman Empire, primarily Yemen, moved to Ottoman Palestine at the same time.
The Second Aliyah was also driven by widespread emigration from Eastern Europe. Two million Jews emigrated, only twenty thousand went to Ottoman Palestine. There were many pogroms at this time, the most well-known being the Kishinev massacre.
The Third-Fifth took place during British rule, so I don't know if I need to keep going to make my point.
If I amended my above scenario to state "Some indigenous groups in less hostile South American countries helped pay for these people's flight to Wyoming, because they were one day hoping for a Native American State" does that substantially change the morality of these people's flight to Wyoming?
I’m having trouble finding too much information on the demographic history with high enough granularity to interpret. I don’t have expertise here, to say the least, and it’s very possible my views would move toward yours if I were informed in more detail. Regarding the first Aliyah, the Bilu do seem to have had Zionist ideology in the modern and (to me) objectionable sense David Engel’s book Zionism describes them as refugees, but neither that book nor the Wikipedia articles goes into much detail on composition. Currently trying to read some very poorly-edited books on the history of Hamas (as in, clearly written by non-native speakers and Routledge didn’t feel the need to provide good editors I guess) - will need to find something good on the relevant demographic history next.
Internal movement of Yemeni Jews, assuming it was legal under the Ottoman framework, doesn’t particularly bother me, even if it happened to have bad effects later (not claiming that it did). Supposing that the Yemeni movements did have net negative effects - I would compare that to the forces that led to ethnic town-country differences in Eastern Europe that ultimately led to so much violence, where the process is less worthy of blame because the bad outcome wasn’t reasonably foreseeable at the time.
The Second Aliyah seems to have been in response to the Russian Revolution. It seems most of the refugees went elsewhere as you said. To the extent that in-migration at this stage was guided or motivated by Zionism, I think that’s blameworthy (not in each individual case) for the same reason that I’d disapprove of the Russian Mennonites engaging in Mennonite-homeland-ism at the same time for the same reasons.
The third and onward occurred after the Balfour declaration - at that point I blame the British and those Zionists who had laid the groundwork for the declaration. To my understanding, this early stage of British rule is what created the conditions that underlie the current situation (e.g., Engels claims, IIRC, that the Yishuv didn’t realistically foresee a Jewish-majority anything until the 30’s).
With regard to the South America analogy, if I’m following correctly the difference is that an indigenous diaspora is now organizing and financing the enclave-formation rather than it being refugee-driven? I think that’s morally worse overall (because I’m less forgiving of wrongdoing not done out of desperation), with more of the wrongdoing shifted from the refugees to their backers.
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I would happily volunteer all of India, but there's so damn many of us that deporting merely 650 million people wouldn't achieve the stated goal.
Well, I suppose if my most useful routes for immigration to the States are blocked, I can't complain..
I’m sure that won’t produce any intractable violence.
As you can see I only advocate for sensible, well thought out policies after a great deal of consideration instead of occasionally making obvious jokes!
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I mostly came to the same conclusions as you after delving into the history, but there are a few Palestinian grievances that I think need more emphasis:
The land matters so much because the Palestinians don't have anywhere to go. No one wants them. The descendants of Palestinian refugees who fled to Lebanon in 1948 still don't have Lebanese citizenship. See also this Matthew Yglesias article on Right of Return.
Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is a big deal. Many religious Zionists consider the ban on Jewish prayer a pragmatic and temporary measure, and that as soon as the political situation cools down and/or messiah comes the Al-Aqsa Mosque will be torn down and the Third Temple rebuilt. This is a pretty big spiritual threat. No one wants to explain to Allah at the last judgement why they let the third holiest site on the planet be destroyed.
Is uniting the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia, watching Sunni and Shi'a standing shoulder to shoulder with Ahmadiyya is your goal, then I can't think of a better way to achieve it than blowing up the Al-Aqsa. Well, other than nuking Kaaba itself.
Of course israel would first ask for the hostages, in exchange for not bulldozing Al-Aqsa. Palestinians and their supporters need to understand that all their kicking and screaming and butchering ultimately means nothing, achieves nothing, and that they are the weak horse. Militarily and spiritually.
It’s just a building, nothing compared to the thousands of deaths on both sides we are contemplating. And persons excluded, stone for stone, they can say it’s revenge for the buddhas of Bamyan. Perhaps buddha would not have approved, but he wasn’t a building.
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This is because Palestinian refugees are an utter ballache for any country nearby who might otherwise recognize them as co-ethnics.
They've apparently caused a great deal of problems in Jordan, and Egypt, which struggles with militant Islamism already, doesn't seem to want them.
Hmm, I wonder why that's the case, when most Jews barring the odd hardliners who refuse to serve in the military and reproduce like rabbits are accepted by the Israelis, and even then most of them are already there..
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You're right, I did not but should have addressed the Palestinian right of return issue. Yglesias' article highlights one of the core tensions I touched upon though. Countries regularly accomodate refugees and mass migrations, like how Turkey (population 85M) currently has 3.3M Syrian refugees in what is functionally permanent status. If Turkey can do that within about a decade, what exactly are the practical barriers for big alleged supporters (Egypt 100M, Saudi Arabia 35M, Algeria 43M, Iran 83M, etc) of the Palestinian cause to open their borders to the ~5M or so Gaza/WB? Hell, or even the 14M total worldwide?
That's why this conflict makes no sense if you only consider the material consequences. Yes, losing your grandpa's land sucks, but that doesn't warrant a multi-generational vendetta. Yes, the Arab governments shed tears for the plight of the Palestinians, but they don't want them around for some reason. None of this makes sense unless you incorporate the ideological component that needs Palestinians to remain where they are and play the role of the downtrodden to maintain the jihadi casus belli against the Jews. This is what makes this conflict so perverse, so many people are just pawns.
Regarding the Temple Mount, I agree that it's a really big deal for some people. It's just really difficult for me to give a shit about people's religious fanaticism. I basically tried to give it as much play as possible when I discussed it in my post, but ultimately as an atheist I just think it's such a fucking stupid hill to die on (heh). The conflict doesn't make sense without this religious component of course.
The biggest practical barrier is that a lot of Palestinians want to move back to Palestine and to punish Israel for kicking them out. Imagine Florida Cubans that aren't just willing to vote for the president that promises tougher sanctions on Cuba or to take part in CIA-sponsored invasions, but are actively turning Miami into an autonomous zone, keeping US authorities out of it and hijacking USCG boats to build their own invasion fleet.
I agree the Palestinian vendetta is a practical barrier, and the rational response is for everyone else to not validate it as a legit mission.
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The trouble is that you and I not giving a shit doesn't stop the Jews and Palestinians from giving a shit -- the conflict would still be pretty intractable without the burning need both groups feel to possess this particular piece of dirt for strictly religious fanatical reasons, but that is indeed the feature that moves it from 'intractable but could be solved by not giving a shit about fanatics' (see 'the Balkans') to 'not solvable at all in any world where you can't genocide or deport ~everyone from one or the other side'.
I agree! We can't control how much other people give a shit about something. What is within our control is how much support we choose to give to other causes, and my post was largely addressing support for Palestine.
I'm close enough to a couple of Israelis to speak frankly to them about this stuff too -- and there's exactly the same chance that they would give up (or even partition) Jerusalem, for much the same reasons as the Muslims.
"A pox on both their houses" is actually a position that recent discourse has largely moved me in the direction of -- but you seem to be making a sort of isolated demand for lack of religious fanaticism on this point?
How is the rigor isolated? I know there's fanaticism on both sides, but the Israeli side is demonstrably much better at keeping their shit reined in. They have Al-Aqsa under occupation and yet they're still willing to dole out what seem like significant concessions to the Muslims.
Concessions that don't involve giving up control of any part of Jerusalem under any circumstances!
Like, do you really think that Israel would be cool with some other country controlling the Temple Mount, so long as they mostly let Jews visit? (unless of course they don't feel like it at some point)
If not, why not?
I don't know what Israel's stance on an "internationalized" or "foreign-administered" Temple Mount would be, it would depend on the specific parameters. My guess would be they would be very much against it unless whatever body/country administers it has a solid reputation for taking Jewish interests to the site seriously. If a Jewish ethnostate is willing to take the step of banning Jewish prayer at the Mount, I guess that any other country (read non-Jewish ethnostate) would be willing to take even more concessions, especially when the opposite side of the pressure risks making them the target of a Jihadi holy war.
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I think "from ... to" would imply a continuous state, so at the best this is asking for a corridor. Realistically, it is a call for replacing all of Israel with a Palestinian state, in which Jews might or might not be safe (realistically the latter).
Slogans need to be evaluated in a cultural context. When Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote "Deutschland ueber alles", it was very possible that he meant that as a call to create a German nation state. However, this slogan had a very different interpretation when some Germans tried to conquer the world. Anyone singing that post-1945 can hardly claim that he means the innocent interpretation and not a call for world conquest.
Likewise, Hamas has their interpretation for what "the river to the sea" means, and has recently focused a lot of attention on the Palestinian cause with their atrocities. Using that slogan only weeks after their bloodbath and claiming that one means the goal of a state where Jews and Palestinians live in peace and friendship is basically asking to be excused on grounds of insanity.
Other than that, I mostly share your assessment. I would perhaps have emphasized a bit more how the far-right-coalition of Netanyahu with it's policy of slowly annexing the West Bank was not helping the peace process or him previously not focusing on Hamas so that that they would form a counterweight to the PLO/Fatah has now spectacularly backfired, but this is mostly because I hold Western countries like Israel to a higher standard (with great GDP comes great responsibility, and all that). I would prefer to live in Bibi's Israel to living in a Palestine run by the likes of Hamas any day of the week.
I really enjoy your podcast, btw. Keep up the good work!
Thanks! I agree with your framework for how to analyze slogans. I wrote a while ago about dog whistles and argued: "a good rule to follow is that the less ambiguous a statement is, the less likely it is a dog whistle. To me, a phrase referencing "Final Solution" is deeply ambiguous and can mean anything from total human extinction to the transcendence victory of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Dog whistles by definition require plausible deniability, and there is more than enough in that phrase to act as a credible dog whistle."
When someone is fully aware of their statement's ambiguity yet insists on using it anyways, I think it's fair to accuse them of intentionally deploying a dog whistle.
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This is correct. 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). I disagree with ethnostate policies, but support anyone's right to found one.
No, I would object to anyone's expulsion from a place they're already established in. I would be fine with that kind of expulsion if it was the result of something they previously agreed to (signing something when they arrive at the Snow Crash enclave). If anyone wants to start an ethnostate on the ocean, or if they secure private property for the purpose of excluding others, I don't have a problem with that.
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I must thank you for this post. Because, despite stating my indifference I feel like I've been driven by the past few weeks -and negative partisanship- into becoming more sympathetic towards Israel than ever before.
Some of the stuff I'm seeing people do is just absolutely ridiculous and some of the arguments - e.g. about what counts as a war crime, a term that seems to have lost all meaning - are really strange when you look at them. There are also solutions so absurd as to seem malicious (e.g. Marc Lamont Hill suggesting Israel let in Gazans into Isarel) and ones that seem to live on another planet where excruciating dilemmas like the ones Israel faces aren't a concern. I think, more than anything, I've been swayed by annoyance by the absolute lack of good plans suggested amongst people so certain they can demonize people with actual skin in the game.
I've never cared about this issue (the Jews weren't really a live issue in my country, so it was mostly wry hints about "those people" if it ever came up) until I became an atheist and then I made it a point to disdain the entire thing as a fascination of Arabophilic African Muslims who cared more about foreigners than their own (I essentially went through a hotep phase) but the more I get into the debate on this the more I really do think there's something to the claim that people really do treat Israel differently.
Anyways, long way to say: thank you for giving me a post-hoc rationalization for my emotional reaction :).
I ran across that Lamont Hill clip too and it's so insane how pathetically misinformed people are on this issue. My friend sent me a 280 page Amnesty International report lamenting the injustices of Israel's security barriers and literally not once does the report ever say anything about the proud tradition of using children as suicide bombers. I pointed this out and she backpedaled and sort-of-maybe-tried to argue that the civil right infringements of a security screening might be too high a price to pay to reduce suicide bombings. Just absolutely clueless. I have yet to come across any semblance of a plan for how to deal with Hamas, except what basically amounts to assuming the problem away.
I felt a similar kind of ambient aversion to the topic, being an Arab immigrant and then steeped within lefty activist circles. Even though I didn't think about the issue much, the thought of expressing any sort of affiliation with Israel would've been absolutely unthinkable to me.
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