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.
The purpose of West Bank settlements is to make a two-state solution impossible.
Palestinians can remain in the West Bank if they agree to be second class citizens without political rights.
Israel’s rightful land extends from the Euphrates to the Nile.
I don’t care about Palestinian children, only my own children.
I like the interview and I respect how honest she is. She doesn’t pretend this is about Hamas or terrorism or anything; it’s her tribe versus someone else’s tribe and her tribe should do whatever it takes to win.
Some thoughts/questions:
How mainstream is her view? My impression is that a lot of Israelis/Israel supporters implicitly think that ultimately there’s no long-term solution other than the killing/displacing all the Palestinians, but aren’t willing to bite the bullet and explicitly advocate for genocide (or know they should be more circumspect about it.)
The Netanyahu government seems like it’s on her side at least through benign neglect. Why does her cause have so much political power?
Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant? On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian. On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
In the end it doesn’t really matter what the extremists think. If the Arabs had accepted the 1947 or 1967 borders and an independent Palestine was a separate, legitimate state (likely with the permanent or temporary presence of various Arab armies), clearly delineated borders, it’s own military and so on, there would be no ‘Jewish settlers’ on its territory.
Would religious Zionists still dream of an Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates? Sure. But Jews dreamed of a return to Israel for millennia without doing anything about it. And of course since the return of the Sinai to the Egyptians, there aren’t any Jewish settlers there either, because they don’t want to die. There aren’t any in Gaza since 2006 either, because they don’t want to die. So again, the dreams of Jewish irredentists in a timeline where the Palestinians didn’t deliberately sabotage their own future are about as irrelevant as the dreams of Germans who wish they could reconquer all of Prussia, or Austrians who would like Hungary back, or even the Spaniards who would seek the return of Gibraltar which, for all the endless whining, isn’t going to happen any time soon either.
They are restricted by reality. The reason the settlers are in the West Bank is because the Palestinians fucked up so badly that, after being curbstomped thrice, they’re now under a combination of partial occupation and collaborationist government. Any number of things could have avoided this for them, settlers want to breed, they wouldn’t cut down the fence to an independent Palestinian state only to get shot by border guards because that defeats the purpose of their ideology. They settle because they can, and they can because the Palestinians, when it came down to it, were unwilling to deal.
But one of the reasons the Arabs fought Israel is because they predicted they would turn into an expansionist state and claim its ancestral borders. This is a damned if you, damned if you don’t. Israel is literally creating new colonies each year within the West Bank and (more egregiously) the Golan Heights, and its history is illustrative —
In 1976, former Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan said Israel provoked more than 80% of the clashes with Syria in the run up to the 1967 war, although historians debate whether he was "giving an accurate account of the situation in 1967 or whether his version of what happened was colored by his disgrace after the 1973 Middle East war, when he was forced to resign as Defense Minister over the failure to anticipate the Arab attack."[89] The provocation was sending a tractor to plow in the demilitarized areas. The Syrians responded by firing at the tractors and shelling Israeli settlements.[90][91] Jan Mühren, a former UN observer in the area at the time, told a Dutch current affairs programme that Israel "provoked most border incidents as part of its strategy to annex more land".[92] UN officials blamed both Israel and Syria for destabilizing the borders
The argument sounds almost like, “why didn’t you let me take your land peacefully? Now that you defended it, you’ve forced me to take your lane!”
I also doubt anyone would make this argument if it were the Arabs destroying Israel militarily. Israelis would be in uproar about Arabs violating international law and taking rightful Jewish clay.
If the Arabs destroyed Israel militarily there would be a lot of kvetching for a few years, then nothing. The refugees/survivors would presumably be accepted by various Western countries, and in a decade Palestine would be just another MENA shithole riven by internal conflict between Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which would adopt a lot of secular Palestinian nationalist elements, and Saudi-backed Sunni militias, who would adopt the rest. It would be a poor dump and nobody would care about it ever again.
Of course, one other thing is that the Jews would never again retake the land (at least in the foreseeable future). America would decide that ‘what’s done is done’, neither Turkey nor Cyprus nor Egypt nor anyone else would give Jews staging ground for an operation to retake their country, the ‘West’ would decide that annoying the Arabs further was unwise and besides, the Jews would be back in the diaspora and settled.
But that underlines the point, really. 98% of the region is Arab, always has been and always will be. Sympathy is therefore difficult. Say the price to secure a white supermajority in Western Europe and North America forever was to hand a tiny sliver of land - say the state of New Jersey, or half of Flanders - to everyone else as an ethnostate. Practically every single wignat I’ve ever encountered would take that deal instantly, no matter the fact that a few locals would be mad. US secessionists talk openly of handing half their country to the ‘enemy’ in a ‘national divorce’.
But the Arabs, even after being trounced several times, throw a fit at the idea of losing - and this is true even in the case of an unrealistically expansionist Zionism - a tiny percentage of their land. And that’s a ‘worst case’ scenario; the Jews have no interest in Arabia itself, nor in Persia or almost all of North Africa or Anatolia (despite having an extensive history in those places).
In truth, there is more than enough land in the region to settle all Palestinians without great hardship, without approaching an unliveable population density and without removing almost all of the region from Muslim control. The Palestinians have been offered a vastly better future than practically any other defeated people in history (in many ways including the Germans and Japanese, who suffered more, lost more, and sacrificed cultural autonomy to American global homogenization, whereas Palestinians have preserved their Islam, their radicalism, their irredentism and most cultural traditions), including the Jews (whom they expelled from their own lands after the founding of Israel, of course).
To me this is as if someone complains that communists have taken over their country and expropriated them. Tragic, I obviously sympathize. Then they say ‘well actually they haven’t, they’re actually just social democrats and they taxed me a little on my billion dollar fortune’. My sympathy is lowered. The expropriation of Arabs in former mandatory Palestine is sad, but it does not seem to me sadder than the expropriation of the region’s Jews (something that of course happened not once but repeatedly for centuries before the founding of Israel), which few seem concerned with.
My continued position is that the Israelis have treated the Palestinians substantially better than Arabs have treated Jews, than Shiites have treated Sunnis (and vice versa) and than warring Sunni tribes have treated each other in most of the conflicts in the region’s history. When they force their way out of their containment zone (implemented due to their attacks on civilians), they have a chimp out and rape, torture and kill women and children like a bronze age warband with RPGs. What mercy do they deserve?
Doesn’t it bother you that you immediately changed your argument from “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because they failed to make an agreement”, to “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because Jews are special and there’s not many of them and Arabs suck?” It betrays the fact that your original argument wasn’t exactly sincere. Or was not at least your main argument.
98% of the region is Arab, always has been and always will be. Sympathy is therefore difficult
That’s a lot like saying “99% of the region is Slavic, therefore sympathy is difficult if Turks decided to conquer Odessa“. It doesn’t make sense as an argument because it ignores the diversity within the term “Arab” and the fact that you don’t suddenly get the right to land because the inhabitants are under the same broad ethnic umbrella. And it ignores that the holy land is particularly important for the whole Arab world.
the Jews have no interest in Arabia itself, nor in Persia or almost all of North Africa or Anatolia
The Jews have no interest in Iran? Have you turned on the news in the past decade? One of their overriding geopolitical interests of Israel is to destabilize Iran, just like they aimed and succeeded to influence American foreign policy toward destabilizing Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It turns out that placing Jews in the heartland of the Muslim world means that they are perpetually neurotic about powerful neighboring states. Which is a recipe for massive regional unrest. Jews have been kvetching about Iran for some time now, with the same WMD lie that they used to sell Iraq to America. Israel has no interest in Iran like America has no interest in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Doesn’t it bother you that you immediately changed your argument from “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because they failed to make an agreement”, to “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because Jews are special and there’s not many of them and Arabs suck?” It betrays the fact that your original argument wasn’t exactly sincere. Or was not at least your main argument.
There are two arguments for two different questions, neither of which is 'does Israel deserve to exist?'.
The first is something like 'are problems with Israeli religious zionist settlers [which is what the original comment was about] in the West Bank an inevitable outcome of the existence of Israel and its settlement by zionists?'. My answer to this is 'no', because (as I said) had the Palestinians accepted the '47 or '67 borders, there would be no settlers on that land because it would have a clear border, be guarded by one or multiple Arab armies and would be recognized by the international community (including the US and Israel, which were prepared and ready to recognize such a Palestinian state at the times in question). There would be no settlers in such a Palestinian state for the same reason there are none in present-day Syria, in present-day Jordan and in present-day Egypt. The sole reason settlers exist in the West Bank is because they can be guarded by the IDF, because the IDF controls the land, because of successive defeats for Arab armies on that land by the IDF, because of wars that the Arabs started.
The second question, which you seemed to be discussing in your next comment, is some variant of 'how much should we sympathize with the Palestinians' plight?'. This is a separate moral consideration since one can certainly sympathize with a defeated party even if they brought ruin upon themselves. In this case, I argue that the grander civilization of which most Palestinians were part continues to control almost all of the region and that resettlement away from historic Palestine - while a partially avoidable (as I said above) tragedy - to nearby Arab lands that are not overpopulated, that have natural resources and that share a cultural, ethnic and religious identity with (predominantly Sunni) Palestinians is a less sympathetic plight than that of Jews who have no 'homeland' peopled by those of their ethnoreligious identity if Israel is destroyed.
This is actually why I'm more sympathetic to, say, the plight of European nationalists than I am to the plight of, say, the Rohingya. The Rohingya are ethnically Bengali Muslims who live next door to the homeland of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh, where their demographic majority is not threatened. If, say, native French become a minority in France, they have no homeland left to return to.
The Jews have no interest in Iran? Have you turned on the news in the past decade?
How much interest did the Jews have in Iran when the central mission of the Iranian state was not the eradication of Israel? I think the answer is comparatively little, and as I recall they were allies. It was only when an explicitly Islamist movement took over the country, almost all the local Jews fled after many were arrested and/or expropriated and/or even executed, and the Iranian government declared that it sought (and would fund, and arm, and incite) the eradication of Israel that Israel pursued its anti-Iran policy.
The counterfactual is valid - Iran could, without altering its demography, territory, flag, national religion or even political system end any Israeli opposition by renouncing (and ceasing to pursue) its hostility toward Israel. There is nothing, by contrast, that the 'Zionist entity' could do to end the opposition of the Iranian revolutionary government other than dissolve itself entirely.
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Notes -
An interview in the New Yorker with settler/activist Daniella Weiss, The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers, is making the rounds on Twitter.
Tl;dr:
I like the interview and I respect how honest she is. She doesn’t pretend this is about Hamas or terrorism or anything; it’s her tribe versus someone else’s tribe and her tribe should do whatever it takes to win.
Some thoughts/questions:
In the end it doesn’t really matter what the extremists think. If the Arabs had accepted the 1947 or 1967 borders and an independent Palestine was a separate, legitimate state (likely with the permanent or temporary presence of various Arab armies), clearly delineated borders, it’s own military and so on, there would be no ‘Jewish settlers’ on its territory.
Would religious Zionists still dream of an Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates? Sure. But Jews dreamed of a return to Israel for millennia without doing anything about it. And of course since the return of the Sinai to the Egyptians, there aren’t any Jewish settlers there either, because they don’t want to die. There aren’t any in Gaza since 2006 either, because they don’t want to die. So again, the dreams of Jewish irredentists in a timeline where the Palestinians didn’t deliberately sabotage their own future are about as irrelevant as the dreams of Germans who wish they could reconquer all of Prussia, or Austrians who would like Hungary back, or even the Spaniards who would seek the return of Gibraltar which, for all the endless whining, isn’t going to happen any time soon either.
They are restricted by reality. The reason the settlers are in the West Bank is because the Palestinians fucked up so badly that, after being curbstomped thrice, they’re now under a combination of partial occupation and collaborationist government. Any number of things could have avoided this for them, settlers want to breed, they wouldn’t cut down the fence to an independent Palestinian state only to get shot by border guards because that defeats the purpose of their ideology. They settle because they can, and they can because the Palestinians, when it came down to it, were unwilling to deal.
But one of the reasons the Arabs fought Israel is because they predicted they would turn into an expansionist state and claim its ancestral borders. This is a damned if you, damned if you don’t. Israel is literally creating new colonies each year within the West Bank and (more egregiously) the Golan Heights, and its history is illustrative —
The argument sounds almost like, “why didn’t you let me take your land peacefully? Now that you defended it, you’ve forced me to take your lane!”
I also doubt anyone would make this argument if it were the Arabs destroying Israel militarily. Israelis would be in uproar about Arabs violating international law and taking rightful Jewish clay.
If the Arabs destroyed Israel militarily there would be a lot of kvetching for a few years, then nothing. The refugees/survivors would presumably be accepted by various Western countries, and in a decade Palestine would be just another MENA shithole riven by internal conflict between Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which would adopt a lot of secular Palestinian nationalist elements, and Saudi-backed Sunni militias, who would adopt the rest. It would be a poor dump and nobody would care about it ever again.
Of course, one other thing is that the Jews would never again retake the land (at least in the foreseeable future). America would decide that ‘what’s done is done’, neither Turkey nor Cyprus nor Egypt nor anyone else would give Jews staging ground for an operation to retake their country, the ‘West’ would decide that annoying the Arabs further was unwise and besides, the Jews would be back in the diaspora and settled.
But that underlines the point, really. 98% of the region is Arab, always has been and always will be. Sympathy is therefore difficult. Say the price to secure a white supermajority in Western Europe and North America forever was to hand a tiny sliver of land - say the state of New Jersey, or half of Flanders - to everyone else as an ethnostate. Practically every single wignat I’ve ever encountered would take that deal instantly, no matter the fact that a few locals would be mad. US secessionists talk openly of handing half their country to the ‘enemy’ in a ‘national divorce’.
But the Arabs, even after being trounced several times, throw a fit at the idea of losing - and this is true even in the case of an unrealistically expansionist Zionism - a tiny percentage of their land. And that’s a ‘worst case’ scenario; the Jews have no interest in Arabia itself, nor in Persia or almost all of North Africa or Anatolia (despite having an extensive history in those places).
In truth, there is more than enough land in the region to settle all Palestinians without great hardship, without approaching an unliveable population density and without removing almost all of the region from Muslim control. The Palestinians have been offered a vastly better future than practically any other defeated people in history (in many ways including the Germans and Japanese, who suffered more, lost more, and sacrificed cultural autonomy to American global homogenization, whereas Palestinians have preserved their Islam, their radicalism, their irredentism and most cultural traditions), including the Jews (whom they expelled from their own lands after the founding of Israel, of course).
To me this is as if someone complains that communists have taken over their country and expropriated them. Tragic, I obviously sympathize. Then they say ‘well actually they haven’t, they’re actually just social democrats and they taxed me a little on my billion dollar fortune’. My sympathy is lowered. The expropriation of Arabs in former mandatory Palestine is sad, but it does not seem to me sadder than the expropriation of the region’s Jews (something that of course happened not once but repeatedly for centuries before the founding of Israel), which few seem concerned with.
My continued position is that the Israelis have treated the Palestinians substantially better than Arabs have treated Jews, than Shiites have treated Sunnis (and vice versa) and than warring Sunni tribes have treated each other in most of the conflicts in the region’s history. When they force their way out of their containment zone (implemented due to their attacks on civilians), they have a chimp out and rape, torture and kill women and children like a bronze age warband with RPGs. What mercy do they deserve?
Doesn’t it bother you that you immediately changed your argument from “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because they failed to make an agreement”, to “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because Jews are special and there’s not many of them and Arabs suck?” It betrays the fact that your original argument wasn’t exactly sincere. Or was not at least your main argument.
That’s a lot like saying “99% of the region is Slavic, therefore sympathy is difficult if Turks decided to conquer Odessa“. It doesn’t make sense as an argument because it ignores the diversity within the term “Arab” and the fact that you don’t suddenly get the right to land because the inhabitants are under the same broad ethnic umbrella. And it ignores that the holy land is particularly important for the whole Arab world.
The Jews have no interest in Iran? Have you turned on the news in the past decade? One of their overriding geopolitical interests of Israel is to destabilize Iran, just like they aimed and succeeded to influence American foreign policy toward destabilizing Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It turns out that placing Jews in the heartland of the Muslim world means that they are perpetually neurotic about powerful neighboring states. Which is a recipe for massive regional unrest. Jews have been kvetching about Iran for some time now, with the same WMD lie that they used to sell Iraq to America. Israel has no interest in Iran like America has no interest in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
There are two arguments for two different questions, neither of which is 'does Israel deserve to exist?'.
The first is something like 'are problems with Israeli religious zionist settlers [which is what the original comment was about] in the West Bank an inevitable outcome of the existence of Israel and its settlement by zionists?'. My answer to this is 'no', because (as I said) had the Palestinians accepted the '47 or '67 borders, there would be no settlers on that land because it would have a clear border, be guarded by one or multiple Arab armies and would be recognized by the international community (including the US and Israel, which were prepared and ready to recognize such a Palestinian state at the times in question). There would be no settlers in such a Palestinian state for the same reason there are none in present-day Syria, in present-day Jordan and in present-day Egypt. The sole reason settlers exist in the West Bank is because they can be guarded by the IDF, because the IDF controls the land, because of successive defeats for Arab armies on that land by the IDF, because of wars that the Arabs started.
The second question, which you seemed to be discussing in your next comment, is some variant of 'how much should we sympathize with the Palestinians' plight?'. This is a separate moral consideration since one can certainly sympathize with a defeated party even if they brought ruin upon themselves. In this case, I argue that the grander civilization of which most Palestinians were part continues to control almost all of the region and that resettlement away from historic Palestine - while a partially avoidable (as I said above) tragedy - to nearby Arab lands that are not overpopulated, that have natural resources and that share a cultural, ethnic and religious identity with (predominantly Sunni) Palestinians is a less sympathetic plight than that of Jews who have no 'homeland' peopled by those of their ethnoreligious identity if Israel is destroyed.
This is actually why I'm more sympathetic to, say, the plight of European nationalists than I am to the plight of, say, the Rohingya. The Rohingya are ethnically Bengali Muslims who live next door to the homeland of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh, where their demographic majority is not threatened. If, say, native French become a minority in France, they have no homeland left to return to.
How much interest did the Jews have in Iran when the central mission of the Iranian state was not the eradication of Israel? I think the answer is comparatively little, and as I recall they were allies. It was only when an explicitly Islamist movement took over the country, almost all the local Jews fled after many were arrested and/or expropriated and/or even executed, and the Iranian government declared that it sought (and would fund, and arm, and incite) the eradication of Israel that Israel pursued its anti-Iran policy.
The counterfactual is valid - Iran could, without altering its demography, territory, flag, national religion or even political system end any Israeli opposition by renouncing (and ceasing to pursue) its hostility toward Israel. There is nothing, by contrast, that the 'Zionist entity' could do to end the opposition of the Iranian revolutionary government other than dissolve itself entirely.
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