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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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The reality is that Israel has created millions of refugees, is creating havoc in the region and waves of migrants toward Europe. They are expanding and clearly have ambitions to grow their country. The Palestinians are well within their rights to fight back. Israel is a permanent threat to its neighbours, who aren't going anywhere. There is no guarantee of peace for Israel's neighbors as long as Israel is a militarized and aggressive nation. As long as Israel is blocking Gaza, killing hundreds of civilians a year and conducting air strikes on Gaza they have every reason to continue fighting. For us in Europe it would be a major win to not have Israel stir up chaos on our border.

The Palestinian population is approaching the population of Algeria in 1960 with Israel having a population that has a large component of religious fanatics who can't fight and combined with one of the scrawniest populations around. There is absolutely strong reasons to believe an insurgency could win.

I can see how Palestinians have a right to fight for what they want: some issues aren't able to be resolved by dialog because of irreconcilable values, and violence is the only solution. But once you believe there's a legitimate war going on, both sides have the right to commit violence. I don't see the current bombing and invasion of Gaza as furthering Israel's interests, but I also don't see destroying enemies who want to destroy you as something that makes Israel worthy of condemnation: they're responding like any state would, just as Palestinians are responding like any colonized indigenous population in the same circumstances would.

Algeria is an interesting comparison, but I think it breaks down. Algeria could be ethnically cleansed of Frenchmen because they were a numerical minority, they had a place to go and, critically, the existence of the French state wasn't threatened. The same isn't true of Israel, which suggests that a Palestinian insurgency to ethnically cleanse Israel of Jews is more likely to fail.