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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25657 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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I've found the recent imbroglio with Congress v. the University Presidents pretty interesting due to the somewhat conflicting reactions I've had and just wanted to post some thoughts.

For those not aware, the Presidents of Penn, MIT, and Harvard recently appeared before at a Congressional committee on the subject of antisemitism on campus. Somewhat unexpectedly, the video of the hearing went somewhat viral, especially the questioning of Rep. Elise Stefanik, who repeatedly asked point-blank if calling for the genocide of Jews would be a violation of the campus code of conduct, to which all the Presidents gave evasive answers. The entire hearing is actually worth watching, at least on 2x speed.

Some of my thoughts:

  1. Rep. Stefanik has a trial lawyer's skill for cross-examination. Her questioning was simultaneously obviously loaded and somewhat unfair but also dramatic and effective at making the respondent look bad. However, I wish she would have focused more on the obvious hypocrisy of claiming to only punish speech that effectively is unprotected by the First Amendment, pointing out some of the more obvious cases where they elevated things like misgendering or dog-whistling white supremacy to "abuse" and "harassment" while refusing to do the same for genocide advocacy. In fairness however, other representatives did ask questions along those lines, though not nearly as effectively.

  2. The University presidents were either woefully unskilled or badly coached on how to handle hostile questions like this. They gave repetitive, legalistic non-answers and declined to offer any real explanation of their underlying position or how to reconcile it with other actions taken for apparently viewpoint-related reasons. Stefanik was obviously getting under their skin, and their default response to grin back while answering like Stefanik was a misbehaving child was absolutely the wrong tactic. The Penn President came across so poorly that she felt she had to post a bizarre follow-up video to almost-apologize for not appearing to take it seriously while at the same time implying without really saying that calling for genocide might be harassment.

  3. Their performance was especially frustrating because they were taking a position that I basically support: that the University will not police opinions, even terribly offensive ones, but will police conduct and harassment. It's not that difficult a position to explain or defend on basic Millian principles, but they couldn't or wouldn't do it. Granted, Stefanik would probably have cut them off if they tried, but they didn't try. They didn't use their time during friendly questioning to do so, and they still haven't. I want to support them in an effort to actually stake out that position. But--

  4. It's hard not to think that the reason they haven't is because they don't believe it. Actions speak louder than words, and there have been a number of cases of Universities, even these specific ones, taking action against people for harmful "conduct" or "harassment" when the conduct in question is actually just expounding an offensive opinion. "Safety concern" has also been a ready justification for acquiescing to heckler's vetoes against disfavored speakers. I simply don't believe that they believe their policy requires them to allow hateful speech against Jews. I think they are lying, and that makes me want to not support them.

  5. The episode seems to have especially impacted what I'll call normie Jews, who are reliably blue-tribe but not radically woke. On the one hand, I think they have a legitimate grievance against the hypocrisy of how the code of conduct policies are interpreted for some opinions vs. arguable antisemitism. On the other hand, I think it's bad policy to not be able to make antisemitic arguments ever, even if maintaining civility. I don't actually believe that hate speech is violence, even antisemitism, and I don't support their movement to make antisemitism a per se violation. On the other, other hand, the cause of knocking down the prestige of the Ivies and exposing their rank hypocrisy might be worth allies of convenience. On the other, other, other hand, as a SWM I feel like the prisoner in the gallows in the "First time?" meme. You have a grievance at their hypocrisy, but I have a grievance at your hypocrisy. Most normie Jews have had no complaints at all about woke people saying similar or worse things about "white people." Some of those woke people were themselves Jews, and I suspect that if the universities capitulate, it will be by making Jews a special protected class, which would further from the outcome that I want. I've had a superposition of all these reactions going on.

As an aside, why do people agree to appear for adversarial Congressional hearings like this? I see this happen quite often.

Congress controls the purse and writes regulations. There's a lot things congress can do that these schools won't like.

Also you need to keep in mind the egos of the Presidents of top schools. They assumed they could make short work out of any questions and that lowly congressmen wouldn't dare be hostile to them.

Congress has subpoena power and you can land a contempt charge for ignoring them.

I'm not American. Is this a thing? Do they do it, or is it just a threat?

You can plead the fifth to every question but you do have to show up.

They did it to Steve Bannon.

But generally no, it requires the DOJ to go along with the charges, and they only will for political reasons.

Ignoring a congressional subpoena is the kind of thing that gets you a constant stream of low-level bad press. You have to be Elon or Trump tier to get away with it as a public figure (and if you aren’t a public figure, you are liable to become one).

Check out the table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress. Looks like some of the more recent examples involve Trump aides refusing to appear for the Jan. 6 hearings.

A recent one on that list that comes to mind shows congress holding someone in contempt only matters if the state itself is willing to act.

Rep. Stefanik has a trial lawyer's skill for cross-examination. Her questioning was simultaneously obviously loaded and somewhat unfair but also dramatic and effective at making the respondent look bad.

I am genuinely baffled by the efficacy of this sort of questioning when it comes to public optics. Are people not interested in or capable of putting themselves in the shoes of the individual being questioned? When I watch this sort of dishonest badgering with such an obvious goal behind it, almost all of my empathy winds up with the person answering the question. I don't even like these university Presidents, I don't think they're doing a good job answering the questions, but I despise this style of questioning so much that all I can think is, "smirking with contempt and refusing to give Stefanik what she wants is the appropriate response".

Are people not interested in or capable of putting themselves in the shoes of the individual being questioned?

Of course they aren’t and they wouldn’t if they could. Lots of people either aren’t smart enough or haven’t developed the skill to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, and university presidents aren’t very popular anyways.

I am genuinely baffled by the efficacy of this sort of questioning when it comes to public optics. Are people not interested in or capable of putting themselves in the shoes of the individual being questioned?

What does putting oneself in the shoes of the individual being questioned have to do with it, though? We can empathize with dishonest, bad people while still appreciating it when they get more revealed for being dishonest and bad to more people. When someone like SBF gets put on trial and convicted, I can empathize with him while also appreciating that it is a good thing that our court system coordinated to kidnap him, judge him, and condemn him to imprisonment for some amount of time, TBD.

When I watch this sort of dishonest badgering with such an obvious goal behind it

I think this sort of badgering works in cases like this where there's an obvious noble - if controversially so - goal behind it.

What does putting oneself in the shoes of the individual being questioned have to do with it, though?

For me, it means considering that my own response would be nothing but contempt for Stefanik and a refusal to cooperate.

I suppose where we differ is in believing there was any noble goal here at all.

While HYP probably don't need any government money, the vast majority of the money for most university's budgets comes directly or indirectly from spending Congress administers (grants, financial aid, etc).

For me, it means considering that my own response would be nothing but contempt for Stefanik and a refusal to cooperate.

Right, anyone who's being humiliated by having their hypocrisy or questionable ethics pointed out, especially so publicly, will likely want to fight against the humiliation. That's understandable. That doesn't make the person any less (or more) deserving of being humiliated.

I suppose where we differ is in believing there was any noble goal here at all.

Sure, but the nobility of the goal is different from the effectiveness of the tactic. Obviously, many people do believe that there's a noble goal here, but regardless, if the goal, noble or not, is to reveal the hypocrisy or incoherence of the person and thus humiliating them, I don't see how putting oneself in the shoes of someone being humiliated changes things.

If I were to put myself in the shoes of someone who deserves to be humiliated, whether that be someone like SBF on trial or someone being questioned in Congress, I would easily consider my own response to be nothing but contempt and refusal to cooperate. Because if I had as bad judgment and character as those people as to voluntarily corner myself in this situation, I would likely lash out in any way I can out of frustration at my own incompetence or (more likely, IMHO) my deluded belief that I was being unfairly attacked due to some [bad political forces] despite the fact that I did everything right. Regardless, I come to the conclusion that the person was deservedly humiliated independent of my empathy for them. Like, I can feel empathy for Saddam Hussein as he's wildly ranting while on trial in 2006, understanding that if I were a psychopathic dictator who put myself into this corner, that I would be at the end of my rope, grasping for every straw I can, pound the table as loudly as I can, and perhaps be rather mentally off due to the despair or denial of what surely seems like my upcoming conviction and execution. This empathy doesn't somehow make his wild ranting look any more noble or any less deranged to me. Nor do I find any sort of antipathy for the people who decided to place Hussein in this position where his wild ranting is an understandable response that I can empathize with.

You have a grievance at their hypocrisy, but I have a grievance at your hypocrisy. Most normie Jews have had no complaints at all about woke people saying similar or worse things about "white people." Some of those woke people were themselves Jews, and I suspect that if the universities capitulate, it will be by making Jews a special protected class, which would further from the outcome that I want. I've had a superposition of all these reactions going on.

This is the only possible outcome. Getting rid of DEI is an impossibility. Nobody with their hands on the levers of power actually wants to do it. All that will actually happen is Jews will get re-ranked inside DEI orthodoxy, or a parallel Jewish patron bureaucracy will be set up. And they will continue to collaborate throwing white people under the bus for literally everything.

They'll continue to vote blue no matter who, regardless of how this is not resolved by Nov 2024.

They can’t easily re-rank Jews on the progressive stack because the ‘opposition’ in this case around Zionism is from POC, not from whites. In the same way they can’t re-rank Asians agains African Americans because of black-on-Asian hate crimes in San Francisco or whatever. POC (especially black people, around whom it’s built) consider Jews to be white, they can’t be reclassified externally while this is the case, it would in effect amount to a destruction of the entire progressive stack if Mark Zuckerberg and Howard Schultz are oppressed rather than oppressors.

I maintain that this is a good reason why the “progressive stack” is a bad model.

Identity politics is and always has been a tangle of relative snap judgments. Not just as a matter of multiple axes, but because those judgments change day to day and with the charisma and decisions of the groups being judged. Act unsympathetic enough, and your support will dry up no matter your ESG score.

I’d go as far as to say the “progressive stack” term only sticks around as a rhetorical cudgel.

Act unsympathetic enough, and your support will dry up no matter your ESG score.

Maybe I am misunderstanding you but are you saying that if a group that progressives are sympathetic towards acts unsympathetic enough their support will dry up, or is the "your" in your statement pointing at something else?

If you are referring to groups acting badly, that I think you're very wrong. What about the long term homeless? It's hard to imagine a group that could act more unsympathetically, and yet progressive zeal for protecting them could not be stronger. If anything, the worse their behavior, the more intense the progressive sympathy towards them appears to be.

@Spookykou has it more or less right. I was thinking of organizations like PETA, but it definitely applies to individuals.

I'm interested, I replied to spookykou, can you tell me if I am misinterpreting you? https://www.themotte.org/post/780/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/168128?context=8#context

The idea of a technology stack like the OSI model or a web ecosystem is funny (and more defensible), but no, it's not what I had in mind. At least on this site, the term is usually used as a hierarchy. That's how the parent posts were using it to describe

re-ranked inside DEI orthodoxy

I assumed the "your" there was an individual. The normal way I see the 'progressive stack' being brought up is to discuss the fall out from a specific event with specific people trying to compare their 'status'. If a gay person loses the court of public opinion in some sort of conflict with a Hispanic person, people on here will ask questions like 'Does this mean gay people are lower on the progressive stack now?'. I tend to agree with netstack here that this is not a very useful model. The 'progressive stack' is at best a useful heuristic that might improve your ability to predict the fall out from such events slightly, but is very far from a consistent of systematized reality.

If a gay person loses the court of public opinion in some sort of conflict with a Hispanic person, people on here will ask questions like 'Does this mean gay people are lower on the progressive stack now?'.

I think that the progressive stack is not so much about who wins, but how strong certain arguments are considered to be and in what situations they can be used. For example, a black person can use "I'm being discriminated against" even in some situations where they themselves messed up and are simply held accountable, while a white person who is actually being discriminated against, can't use that same argument unless the discrimination is very extreme indeed.

In social combat between woke people, you can expect them to use arguments that work for their identity in the situation. But that still doesn't mean that a black person can always just defeat a white person in social combat. The former just has more options.

I assumed the "your" there was an individual. The normal way I see the 'progressive stack' being brought up is to discuss the fall out from a specific event with specific people trying to compare their 'status'. If a gay person loses the court of public opinion in some sort of conflict with a Hispanic person, people on here will ask questions like 'Does this mean gay people are lower on the progressive stack now?'.

Interesting, that's fair. That isn't what I've assumed that term means. I'm going to use software as an example to describe the different concepts and keep them in the same domain (plus I assume that RAT terms are often informed by software given their demographics)

You're saying the "progressive stack" is referring to an implicit hierarchy of groups in order. That's fair and is implied by the term stack. Metaphorically similar to the stack as a software data structure.

I've always interpreted it be referring a selection of active beliefs. Not implying a hierarchy, simply a set of useful tools being used by for a purpose. Metaphorically similar to a set of software tools that are being used by a company. eg one software engineer asking another "What stack does your company use" - "Oh, we use MEAN: Mongo, Express, Angular, Node.js"

The second usage, the one I have assumed, being used to imply that the beliefs held by progressive are primarily determined by their heuristic usefulness, instead of their logical compatibility. And also not implying hierarchy.

I may be really misinterpreting here, I'll look at how it's used more carefully.

The long-term homeless are unsympathetic to you. The progressive movement considers them far more acceptable than Hobby Lobby or Chick-Fil-A, so long as they're far enough away that they don't get robbed personally, and sometimes not even then (insert bike comic here).

The behavior is more common at an individual level... that then spreads to groups.

The long-term homeless are unsympathetic to you. The progressive movement considers them far more acceptable than Hobby Lobby or Chick-Fil-A, so long as they're far enough away that they don't get robbed personally, and sometimes not even then (insert bike comic here).

That's true but not an argument against what I said, unless I misunderstood the comment I was replying to.

The comment above me said this

Identity politics is and always has been a tangle of relative snap judgments. Not just as a matter of multiple axes, but because those judgments change day to day and with the charisma and decisions of the groups being judged. Act unsympathetic enough, and your support will dry up no matter your ESG score.

My read on that was that it implied that if a group acted badly, "unsympathetically", then the progressives would stop supporting them. If "unsympathetic" is referring to what the progressives think is unsympathetic then the above statement I was replying to is tautological, right?

Yes, well put. I don’t think the “woke establishment” has a good play here insofar as large swathes of the vanguard progressive movement are actually anti-Semitic by normie standards, while large swathes of the journalistic, financial, and political leadership of the movement are themselves Jewish and many of them feel betrayed by the wider left in the wake of October 7th.

I see two main possible outcomes. Either the leadership reins in the vanguard and has an anti-semitism purge as per Starmer in the UK. The effect of this would be disillusionment in the vanguard and a sense of betrayal. Many of the most passionate and/or psychotic progressives will splinter off. Alternatively, if the leadership is too weak to rein in the vanguard, then a lot of powerful Jewish Americans will splinter from the woke fringe (a la Luciana Berger in the UK), probably mostly flocking to centrist Democrat spaces.

Either way, it’s not a fight that can be brushed under the rug.

You know it really has surprised me that the US left seems to be more resistant to a purge than the British left (which is both less Jewish and more pro-Palestinian). I think in part it’s that Starmer’s purge wasn’t really about antisemitism but about drawing a line under the failed Corbyn era, with antisemitism a useful cudgel to purge the party of all the hard left Seamus Milne types (who were anti-Zionist out of their leftism, really). There’s also the fact that, with the exception of a few Cynthia Nixons, most anti-Zionist political types on the US left are POC, whereas in the UK they were largely white Brits on the hard left.

Then I guess they'll just set up a parallel Jewish patron bureaucracy. And it's sole job will be to gatekeep Jewish complaints about discrimination, accuse Jews who do complain of being "alt-right white nationalist", and continue to blame white people for everything.

Basically college chapters of the ADL in every school.

Or more likely, they’ll get increasingly uncomfortable trying to explain why Jews shouldn’t be getting uncomfortable about it. Wokeness and DEI really doesn’t have a playbook for pretending to take legitimate concerns into account.

Sure it does. The playbook is establish the official grievance front for all ethnic groups (except whites, they aren't allowed one), and then gatekeep what racial grievances are allowed. They use their control of mainstream media and all social media (except twitter) to enforce an embargo on non-allowed racial grievance. And they make sure in what reporting they do allow, you never actually hear the words of aggrieved, only their nonsensical caricatures of how evil and racist they are.

This has been going on for 20 years. Every single time I thought "Surely normies will wake up now", it's been an utter disappointment and shit show. There will be nothing different about this time either.

I does not shock me that university presidents are bad at hostile questioning. The university itself is generally not used to hostile questioning and quite often the discussions that happen are not adversarial or at least if they are, it’s with a view to eventually tease out the truth. In courts and public opinion debates the point is not to get at the truth so much as to sound right and win. It’s two very different ways of approaching debate, and if you go into a public opinion or court debate with the mindset of collaborative debate, you’re going to look like and idiot no matter what you do.

I don’t agree with the way you splice up the debate types. You’ve got the old-school adversarial debate, in the interest of finding out the truth (so still cooperative on a deep level), which used to be at home in universities, and I guess we still have here, for example. Then you’ve got the adversarial politician’s debate, which looks and sometimes is similar, but with dirtier rhetorical tricks to appear right.

But the university presidents have little experience of those. They are used to more surface-level cooperative debates, where the goal is not the Truth but the reaching of a status-adjusted consensus. Free speech gets in the way of that consensus. Hostile questioning, from that perspective, is rude and a status challenge. The correct answer is not to answer but to air your disdain and let your higher status win the debate consensus for you.

They [the university presidents] are used to more surface-level cooperative debates, where the goal is not the Truth but the reaching of a status-adjusted consensus.

Agreed. I'd bet that it's been quite some time since they've had to deal with someone who genuinely disagrees with (or is otherwise hostile to) their worldview/agenda.

I think it's simpler than that -- the university presidents are used to being the ones asking the hard questions, not answering them.

Most law-abiding citizens are not used to answering hard questions.

You haven't work in IT after a major fuck up. Having to invent a scrape goat on the spot is really taxing.

There’s a reason “don’t talk to the police” is popular legal advice. A hostile interrogator has a real advantage.

It's worth pointing out that these Presidents are at the long end of a fashion arms race that leads to absurd opinions. Expressing normie opinions is not the way to climb to the top of the heap in academia.

Thus we lead to a situation where slight deviations from recent progressive norms are deemed "hate speech" while calls for literal genocide are not.

It's similar to the men of the Middle Ages who wore pointier and pointier shoes.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-europeans-pointy-shoes

It's not like these men independently arrived at the idea that these shoes were somehow better. And, if they wore the same shoes 200 years earlier or later they'd look ridiculous. But if you asked them to explain why they wore the shoes, they'd probably be able to mutter some sort of answer other than the true one: "everyone else is doing it".

Are you shocked when politicians don't express sincere beliefs on the campaign trail? What if they only campaigned to a tiny sliver of the far left? Imagine the lunatic ideas they'd have to express to get noticed. Yes increasingly, that's what it takes to advance in academia.

These Presidents aren't stupid. Instead they are the result of a long and thoroughly rotten distillation process that rewards a very specific set of extreme beliefs. Signalling is a hell of a drug.

Drive-by tangent.

The University presidents were either woefully unskilled or badly coached on how to handle hostile questions like this. They gave repetitive, legalistic non-answers and declined ...

Repetitive, legalistic non-answers are also what professional civil-servants give in front of such committees too, even though it's their day job. It's probably the least-worst tactic given the situation, and it prevents you getting actually skewered.

Yes this seems correct. There is no upside and considerable downside risk in answering in any other way. Similarly one should not talk to police beyond the absolute minimum legally required.

I disagree. These hearings play to the public. Having a cogent answer and a cooperative demeanor could be helpful. There is of course increased downside risk as well, but I think someone skilled could sway public opinion in their favor even in the face of hostile questioning, or at least limit the downside risk of public outrage.

Very little on C-Span makes news that people pay attention too. Taking the risk usually pays off.

Repetitive, legalistic non-answers are also what professional civil-servants give in front of such committees too, even though it's their day job

Congress could hold someone in contempt right?

That's why you have to show up and play the game. "Go fuck yourself" is not a sufficiently legalistic non-answer.

BTW: A lot has happened since this original thread and it's impressive how badly this tactic went for these people. I state again however: this is the standard way to behave in front of such committees. Or at least it is here in Australia.

For correctly stating that the answer depends on the context or other actions but this isn't inherently forbidden by school policy? I don't suppose so. I don't think anyone is getting convicted for merely stating legalistic technically true answers.

Yes but it's toothless unless the DOJ takes up the contempt charge for them.

Yes, people often wonder how bureaucrats who are otherwise quite charismatic and charming behave like robots at public hearings or with politicians in general, but they’re coached to do so by others in the permanent bureaucracy. The worst thing in that position is for a politician to care, one way or another, a great deal about you personally. It means scrutiny, it means attention from the opposition, it makes your life and that of your coworkers more difficult. So the best thing is to appear as much the gray suit as possible, so they hopefully forget you. If you argue forcefully back then, well, you’ve become a politician.

I deeply regret the Republicans didn’t win the Senate in 2022. Rand Paul would’ve made (justly imo) Fauci’s life a living hell.

How so? He could have just retired slightly sooner, still quite rich and still doing the rounds on news/talk shows answering tough questions like "how does it feel to have saved eleventy-trillion lives with Science(tm)?" Rand Paul constantly grilling him would barely even be reported on, let alone actually affect his life.

I think one confounding factor is what kind of language counts as advocating genocide against Jews. Probably the most prominent example of this recently has been the phrase "from the river to the sea." Some people surely use it with a genocidal intent (there should be no Jews between the "river and the sea") while other use it as an expression of solidarity between the West Bank, Gaza, and non-Jews in Israel more generally. If I use the phrase am I advocating genocide against Jews in Israel? It probably depends on the context! I suspect the presidents here correctly deduced how their answers might be weaponized.

I think the whole discourse has been poisoned by Zionists who regard criticism of Israel as a state as criticism of Jews as a people, which is an absurd notion.

Live by the sword die by the sword. The left has aggressively pushed that everything and anything is a dog-whistle for racism, islamophobia, homophobia, etc. The too cute by half, about face to it being idiotic to suggest that antizionism is antisemitism rings hollow.

Probably the most prominent example of this recently has been the phrase "from the river to the sea." Some people surely use it with a genocidal intent (there should be no Jews between the "river and the sea") while other use it as an expression of solidarity between the West Bank, Gaza, and non-Jews in Israel more generally.

I must admit I'm pretty ignorant about this phrase and why it's considered genocidal. Getting rid of Israel as a nation and even kicking out all of the Jews from there isn't genocidal, just ethnic cleansing, right? Is the issue that that was the Nazis' initial plan before they got to the Final one, and as such we can round one up to the other? That seems like the slippery slope fallacy (though I'll admit that there is indication that the people descending down the slope are doing so by pouring oil on it rather than by carefully inching down by building steps or something).

But I'd also say that, if it's the case that the phrase is genocidal in nature, then it doesn't really matter if the person saying the slogan is thinking to themselves, "I'm saying this because I really want those Jews murdered" or "I'm saying this because I want to show solidarity between XYZ and literally not an inch more;" the latter is still showing full-throated support for genocide, and their ignorance of what the phrase that they chant means just adds on to their ethical failure, and certainly doesn't mitigate it. I'm just not sure how the phrase could be genocidal in nature.

Well, I think the idea is if you are claiming Palestine will control the area currently controlled by Jews the result will likely be not the mass expulsion of Jews but the mass murder of Jews.

Hm, I always presumed that Palestine would control the area by expelling the Jews, but I can see that I was jumping to conclusions. Since Palestinian government has made multiple costly signals that mass murdering Jews is something they desire, so if Palestine "being free" refers to something like "current Palestinian government takes over all of that land (between river and sea), as if all of the IDF suddenly disappeared or lost their weapons," that's clearly calling for genocide, I would agree. Still, it seems to me there's enough ambiguity in "being free" to give room for doubt. Certainly some - likely many - people use the chant as a way to cheer for the murdering of Jews, and I also sympathize with how hypersensitive Jews would be to being murdered due to recent history, but it still seems unwarranted to call the chant genocidal, at least without independent individual evidence.

That ambiguity is why it’s necessary to inform kind-minded people that the Arabic translation is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.” It rhymes because good propaganda has rhetorical power.

It’s like saying, “From the Rhine to the Oder, Germany will be Aryan” but replacing Aryan with “prosperous” in a language where either of the bordering rivers rhymes with that language’s word for “prosperous”.

That ambiguity is why it’s necessary to inform kind-minded people that the Arabic translation is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.” It rhymes because good propaganda has rhetorical power.

Can you give a cite for this?

From Wikipedia, who I do not trust:

The concept of 'from the river to the sea' has appeared in various protest chants, typically as the first line of a rhyming couplet.

In Arabic The version min an-nahr 'ilā l-baḥr / Filasṭīn satatḥarrar (من النهر إلى البحر / فلسطين ستتحرر 'from the river to the sea / Palestine will be free') has a focus on freedom.[30]

The version min al-mayyeh lil-mayyeh / Filasṭīn ʿarabiyyeh (من المياه للمياه / فلسطين عربية 'from the water to the water / Palestine [is] Arab') has an Arab nationalist sentiment, and the version min al-mayyeh lil-mayyeh / Filasṭīn Islamiyyeh (من المياه للمياه / فلسطين إسلامية 'from the water to the water / Palestine [is] Islamic') has Islamic sentiment.[31] According to Colla, scholars of Palestine attest to the documentation of both versions in the graffiti of the late 1980s, the period of the First Intifada.[31]

In English 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free'—the translation of min an-nahr 'ilā l-baḥr / Filasṭīn satatḥarrar—is the version that has circulated among English speakers expressing solidarity with Palestine since at least the 1990s.[31]

...So it sounds like different people use different versions, of which one actually is "shall be free".

I’ll cite that Wikipedia article. There are three basic recorded variations, one ends with “Palestine will be Islamic”, the other says “Palestine will be Arabic”. Only the third one talks about freedom.

Mine was never a strong point to begin with, but it is an important one to give context.

That's certainly important context and pushes the needle in my mind towards it being more genocidal than I initially thought. That said, I think if they modified the phrase when chanting it in English, I think that also changes the meaning. Perhaps one could argue that they're showing solidarity with people who are calling for genocide, and it might be a tough needle to thread there between showing solidarity with pro-genocide people and actually calling for genocide oneself, but I don't think it's impossible.

The sheer rhetorical weight of the “you have been lied to/fooled by people seeking more power” meme should at least give them pause and make them reflect.

It’s famously the first bit of rhetoric in the Bible, when the serpent told Eve that God lied to the progenitor couple to keep them from becoming like Him. It’s a tool for defense lawyers, for the media, for sellers of products. It’s hard to exaggerate just how useful it is when exposing a real lie told to increase power.

I think the whole discourse has been poisoned by Zionists who regard criticism of Israel as a state as criticism of Jews as a people, which is an absurd notion.

This is a ‘yes but…’, but ‘Jews out of occupied Palestine’ is ethnic cleansing by definition. And that is in fact the end point of ‘Israel as a state doesn’t have the right to exist’.

Yes, Israeli Jews will find someone- probably Canada, which is retarded about immigration to begin with- to take them in if they have to leave on short notice. But it’s still pretty bad to kick people out of their homes.

They would come to the US almost certainly.

This may come as a surprise but I do not support the forced expulsion of Jews from current Israel either!

Uh, what do you think happens to Israeli Jews if Israel no longer exists?

Ideally we end up with a state that integrates both Jews and Palestinians equally. I an agnostic on whether this state is named "Israel".

Ideally, sure. I don't think he was asking for ideals. What would actually happen? What do you believe would actually happen to Israeli Jews if Israel no longer existed?

I assume some period of bloody inter-ethnic conflict, with what ultimate end I am unsure.

You mean like the bloody inter-ethnic conflict which created modern Israel?

And ideally when the two wolves and lamb vote for what’s dinner they will settle on grass.

But I’m not holding out much hope for the lamb.

I mean in this case given the relative military strength I think it's more like the horse and the weasel voting on what's for dinner. I think the horse will be just fine.

I’m responding to a statement saying there should be one state with Palestinians and Jews. Once you give Palestinians control over Israel, it is likely game over for the Jews there (hence my example)

If it's just one state, don't they share the same military power?

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Yes, they will set aside long-standing ethnoreligious differences and celebrate by eating a flying pig.

What do you think happens if that state suddenly exists? Is it a democracy? What do you think the Palestians elect to do to the Jews?

Optimistically we can reach some kind of stable power sharing situation. Possibly with international guarantee.

I don’t fully understand what you’re proposing here. It doesn’t sound like a better situation for anyone involved. Is this actually two states occupying the same territory with international militaries policing it? How could this possibly be better than the present situation?

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The 1948 UN partition plan was exactly that. The Arabs invaded anyway.

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This is the only possible outcome. Getting rid of DEI is an impossibility. Nobody with their hands on the levers of power actually wants to do it. All that will actually happen is Jews will get re-ranked inside DEI orthodoxy, or a parallel Jewish patron bureaucracy will be set up. And they will continue to collaborate throwing white people under the bus for literally everything.

Somebody writing for the Wall Street Journal did a bit of polling, and the results were amusingly predictable.

Only 47% of respondents could identify which river and which sea "from the river to the sea" meant. When shown the region on a map and realizing what the slogan would mean, 75% of respondents who had previously supported the slogan moderated their opinion.

Please tell me it’s the Mediterranean, because I can’t remember which of the inland seas is closest…

From the Jordan to the Dead Sea would certainly reduce tensions.

Slight tangent but I've seen a decent number of people who think the West Bank is in Western Israel and don't realize it means the west bank of the Jordan River.

Good thing they're not calling it the Cis- and Trans-jordan anymore, that would really confuse people

I think the whole discourse has been poisoned by Zionists who regard criticism of Israel as a state as criticism of Jews as a people, which is an absurd notion.

There's a !!fun!! space of discussion around people merging the two, but I don't think it's particularly relevant for these cases. It's not like these schools would have accepted a protest at a Hispanic Student's Union over Mexican gang violence/drug trafficking hitting Americans, even if the textual criticism was clearly about separate groups from the students.

while other use it as an expression of solidarity between the West Bank, Gaza, and non-Jews in Israel more generally

This goes beyond plausible deniability well into implausible deniability.

Would a native American who said "from the pacific to the Atlantic the Native will be free", be kicked off campus? Would "From Zimbabwe to the sea, South Africa will be free", make them kick you off campus? Funny how these big jewish sponsors were fiercely opposed to any for of white nationalism yet see any opposition to their ethnostate as genocide. Funny how white identities can be completely deconstructed and how thought crimes against diversity get people unpersoned yet the same logic doesn't apply in the other way.

I really see no reason for us goyim to support them at all. For the left, Israel is everything they claim white nationalists to be except worse. You don't see many on the alt right proposing massive airstrikes on the suburbs of Paris. For the right the Zionists is the ADL pushing woke agenda, mass migration into western countries and banning thought crime on twitter. The zionists have managed to alienate almost everyone except themselves and a dying number of evangelicals.

I really see no reason for us goyim to support them at all.

It’s a good excuse to hit people who hate us too. It’s like what the old Armenian said to the young Armenian- ‘my son, treasure the Jews. When they are gone, we will be next.’

It’s like what the old Armenian said to the young Armenian- ‘my son, treasure the Jews. When they are gone, we will be next.’

That has it completely backwards though. The Armenians were first.

From Zimbabwe to the sea, South Africa will be free

Given the non-existence of a Palestinian state and the current local power structure, I might suggest something along the lines of "from the Ocean to the Cape, the Boers own the Landscape". The Boers need a homeland! They're being genocided! Obviously not a perfect simulacrum, but it is interesting to notice just how thoroughly castigated anyone making such a suggestion would be in polite company.

The point that Ackman made on Twitter when he called for them to resign was that they’ll kick you out or try to remove even tenured faculty for saying one thing remotely against the progressive ‘consensus’ on trans issues / gender identity or on evopsych when it comes to differences between men and women (let alone HBD), but things of the ‘river to the sea’ variety are tolerated, when they seem at least ‘as’ controversial. They are not free speech absolutists, so what’s the issue with lobbying to ban speech you don’t like, seeing as they already do it for people who contribute much less money to the endowment than wealthy Jews?

And on that note I think you’d get many people here arguing in that direction if a large and well armed movement of native Americans was kidnapping, raping, killing etc large numbers of whites under, in part, that slogan, and Harvard was tolerating that chant.

So if someone defends European/white culture they get banned. Yet, he is upset that people aren't banned when they oppose zionism.

And on that note I think you’d get many people here arguing in that direction if a large and well armed movement of native Americans was kidnapping, raping, killing etc large numbers of whites under, in part, that slogan, and Harvard was tolerating that chant.

If someone wanted to build white settlements on reservations, set up economic blockades around the reservations, kill hundreds of natives every year and then conduct relentless airraids for months on them when they resist they would have been completely wiped out of academia.

If someone wanted to build white settlements on reservations, set up economic blockades around the reservations, kill hundreds of natives every year and then conduct relentless airraids for months on them when they resist they would have been completely wiped out of academia.

Well yes, because natives are doing no harm to us except running casinos and occasionally protesting oil pipelines. The Choctaws not firing homemade rockets at Tulsa and periodically sending out raiding parties to kidnap random people after raping and killing even more random people is a relevant difference.

Well yes, because whites are doing no harm to the natives anymore...

If someone wanted to build white settlements on reservations, set up economic blockades around the reservations, kill hundreds of natives every year

They killed a lot more than that when they built a white settlement on the biggest reservation of all, which is why they’re currently 70% of the population and natives are…2%. There may be some performative regret on the left, but in every real sense the process of settlement has totally and permanently dispossessed the indigenous inhabitants. There is no remaining territory for native North Americans that is not under the ultimate political control of a non-native majority.

By contrast, and even in a worst case scenario, many ancestors of indigenous Palestinians migrated extensively around the Levant, and they and many of the rest could easily be accommodated in the neighboring Levantine Arab countries that are religiously, ethnically, phenotypically and largely genetically indistinguishable from them.

There is no remaining territory for native North Americans that is not under the ultimate political control of a non-native majority.

Not north of the Rio grande.

I think the whole discourse has been poisoned by Zionists who regard criticism of Israel as a state as criticism of Jews as a people, which is an absurd notion.

Note that the House of Representatives has now passed a resolution endorsing this interpretation, by a vote of 311 yeas (69 % Republicans) to 14 nays (93 % Democrats), with 92 abstentions (all Democrats).

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

(4) clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism

Agreed, it is the same with some people performing Roman salute while shouting Sieg Heil!, it is just saying Hail victory! in German. Some people surely use it with genocidal intent, while other people use this ancient salute in its original intent - "to give their hearts" by figuratively grabbing it by in their right hand and offering it on display. They may just want to express their strong support for your victory in your struggle. And as for why should they speak in German? It may have nothing to do with any hypothetical alignment of their views with weltanschauung espoused by national socialists in 1930s Germany. They maybe just like to use words like schadenfreude, it makes them look more educated. Context matters!

Implying this is sarcasm, Palestine can recover its ancestral territory without deleting all the Jews therein. And deleting Israel the political entity does not establish genocide. Jews would still exist without the country of Israel. From the Wikipedia article:

In the 1960s, the PLO used it to call for a democratic secular state encompassing the entirety of mandatory Palestine which was initially stated to only include the Palestinians and the descendants of Jews who had lived in Palestine before the first Aliyah, although this was later expanded.

Jews would still exist without the country of Israel

COULD exist, if the Arab majority allowed it, and didn't e.g. revert to the policy that you quoted.

Let's be blunt. The overwhelming majority of criticism of Israel is antisemitism. Sure, in theory you can criticize Israeli policy while holding no ill will towards Jews, just as you can don a swastika without being a nazi. There's probably even a few people doing that! But it's not the bulk of what we're seeing.

I could understand someone being horrified by both Hamas' genocidal attack and Israel's forceful response. But that doesn't describe the people flying Palestinian flags and donning keffiyehs. That does not describe the people chanting "long live the intifada" or "victory to the freedom fighters" or "from the river to the sea" or "gas the Jews". They aren't upset that the war is happening, they are upset that Israel is winning.

These people fundamentally see Hamas' attack as legitimate and Israel's response as illegitimate, because they see Israel itself as illegitimate, and they see Israel as illegitimate because it's a Jewish country. It's as clear and simple as that.

No one protests the British creation of Jordan just a few years before Israel. Why not? Because Jordan is full of Arabs. The conflict is not about lines on a map, it is about Jews.

And let's be clear about what "Zionism" is. It's the belief that Israel should continue to exist. Anyone who describes themselves as "anti-Zionist" is demanding an end to the Jewish state, from which will inevitably follow an end to the Jewish population in the middle east. If you are not for Zionism, you are for genocide.

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The overwhelming majority of criticism of Israel is antisemitism.

Strong disagree. Most of the criticism of Israel that comes from the right or from Muslims is antisemitism, but most of it from the American left (including progressive Jews) is about dislike of the "oppressor", characterizing Israel as a white, colonizing force. This makes for some very strange bedfellows where antisemitism is happily tolerated, but Norm Finkelstein doesn't hate Israel because he's an antisemite, he hates Israel because he's a commie.

I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say that most of the criticism of Israel that comes from the right is antisemitic, at least not in the United States. Some of it is antisemitic, sure, but plenty of it also comes from Pat Buchanan-style isolationists and from folks—especially, in my experience, younger folks—who find some of Israel’s actions and foreign influence questionable at best. The attitude of the latter group toward the current conflict can perhaps best be summed up as “I just hope both sides have fun,” which I’ve seen a number of times and which is distinctly not antisemitic.

Oh, fair. I suppose I was thinking more of the people that genuinely dislike Israel rather than those that are merely indifferent and tired of shoveling money overseas in general.

Some of it is antisemitic, sure, but plenty of it also comes from Pat Buchanan-style isolationists and from folks—especially, in my experience, younger folks—who find some of Israel’s actions and foreign influence questionable at best.

Maybe, but I'd say most of the latter are either misinformed (by anti-semites on the right or the left, who push the story of Evil Israel oppressing the poor innocent Palestinians who just want to get along) or poor at making distinctions between the flawed and the genocidal.

Or they’re tired of America being the world police; tired of America being asked to foot the bill for “America’s greatest ally,” even when that ally… hasn’t been all that great, actually; and tired of seeing all the double standards that apply anytime Israel comes up. For example, want to boycott apartheid South Africa? The US will happily join you in that. Want to boycott Israel? 37 states will do everything in their power to stop you. Or take safety: the pro-Israel crowd loves to talk about the hatred Palestinians feel toward Israel, and declare that it would be unreasonable to ask the Israelis to let those Palestinians become Israeli citizens and voters. But those same people don’t seem the least bit concerned when South African politicians enliven their mass rallies with the cheerful music of “Kill the Boer,” nor were they concerned in the 1980s, when PAC party members led “one settler, one bullet” chants among their supporters.

Pro-israel: moderate liberals and conservatives, evangelicals, jews

Anti-israel: hard left, woke, hard right, muslims

If you're looking for people endorsing 'kill the boer’, just go to one of your side's rallies, and turn your head slightly to the left.

This culture war skirmish is my favourite: finally, all the people I can’t stand are on the opposite side.

Hmm, this might be one reason I find this conflict so irritating. I’m suddenly finding myself with an uncomfortable group of allies.

Most of these people weren't politically active (if they were even born) when apartheid South Africa existed. And I reiterate oing the whole "a pox on both your houses" thing when one house is clearly more pox-deserving than the other is to support the cause of injustice. I do not believe for a minute the people you refer to are "tired of America being the world police"; those are the isolationists, and they're not the ones who "find some of Israel’s actions and foreign influence questionable at best".

Or, to put it more clearly, you're not fooling anyone.

Oh, I’m not trying to fool anyone. Unlike our Secure correspondent, I have no problems with Jews. No, my beef is with Israel. I believe they have a parasitic relationship with the United States, I dislike the influence they have over our politicians, and I despise the blatant hypocrisy of their most ardent defenders. All that said, I don’t like the Palestinians much either. I think I might have said this before, but as I see it, the Israelis are a bunch of bastards, and the Palestinians are an even bigger bunch of bastards (with the usual caveat that there are some fine people on both sides).

With regard to the most recent conflict, my chief concern is that the United States stays out of it. Not a penny of aid to Israel, no munitions, no bribing the Egyptians to play nice, and no accepting any Palestinian refugees. I hate that we are getting involved, that our congress is passing bills equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, that the universities are getting dragged on the carpet for allowing anti-Israel protests (which I’m not going to deny included some antisemitic speech), when no one cared that they allowed anti-white speech, or at least certainly didn’t care to the same extent.

More broadly, I find it ridiculous and unamerican that 3/4th of our state legislatures have passed laws to protect Israeli financial interests. I hate the fact that so many conservatives (my own crowd) unthinkingly consider Israel our greatest ally, just because their congressmen and Fox News told them they were. I briefly had this argument with my father recently; he thinks Israel should bomb Gaza and the West Bank (!) to the ground, so that not a single building is left standing. If any Palestinians survive, fine. If they don’t, that’s fine too. He furthermore believes that we should fund this insane genocide, because “Israel is our greatest ally. Just look at how they were there for us after 9/11.” When I asked why Britain, Germany, or Australia—countries that actually sent troops to help us, unlike Israel, didn’t deserve the title of “greatest ally” instead, he retreated to saying “they provided us with intelligence.” When I pointed out that their intelligence included the lies about WMDs in Iraq, he lost interest in continuing the discussion. “We just need to help them any way we can.” Here’s the thing, he’s not so mind-killed on any subject but Israel, and he’s far from alone in that regard!

Meanwhile, my political opponents are even worse. Colonialism is evil, except for Israel. Stealing land is evil, except for settlements in the West Bank. Apartheid is evil, unless the victims are Palestinian (and yes, I know Israel has some Arab Israeli citizens, and even allows them the vote. They notably forbade them the vote initially, and only enfranchised them once it became clear that the Jewish Israelis had and would keep their ethnic majority). I at least give some credit to the pro-Palestinian left for being consistent, even if I think the Palestinians are mostly worse than the Israelis.

Cycling back around to the start of this comment, all of this wouldn’t bother me if it remained academic. If America would just keep its money and it’s materiel off the table, I wouldn’t care what people thought about the conflict. But that just doesn’t seem in the cards—and what’s more, most people think that’s great. When I opposed our support of the Arab Spring, I found plenty of sympathizers. When I said we shouldn’t get involved in Syria, lots of people agreed. Even when I said that Europe can defend Ukraine if it wants to, but we should not, people were willing to hear me out. For some reason (media influence, sympathy for the Holocaust, whatever), all but the most ardent isolationists (and far-right and far-left) think we should give Israel whatever it wants. I just can’t fathom where this undying, unthinking loyalty to Israel comes from, nor why people care so much more about it than they do about the many more pressing problems we face here in this country.

And I reiterate doing the whole "a pox on both your houses" thing when one house is clearly more pox-deserving than the other is to support the cause of injustice.

Naw. I'm under no obligation to pick a guy who killed twenty and raped three over a guy who killed thirty and raped six. Whatever they do to each other, I have no interest in.

those are the isolationists, and they're not the ones who "find some of Israel’s actions and foreign influence questionable at best".

I am an isolationist who finds some of Israel's actions and foreign influence questionable at best.

The overwhelming majority of criticism of Israel is antisemitism.

The confounder is and always will be that they already hate Whiteness, or white supremacy or settler colonialism whatever term is being used today.

Israel just happens to be the most recent country (with the largest number of people making a counter-claim) that could fit in the mold of "white settlers". If Rhodesia or apartheid South Africa still existed they might get the same reaction

No one cares about Jordan for the same reason nobody cares about South Africa now, regardless of how things are going over there.

The other thing is that the left-wing coalition is diverse. There are a lot of Arabs/Muslims who appropriate the language of anti-colonialism because it's the language of the dominant power but are really just angry they lost to Jews - they don't care about "imperialism" since they glorify the conquests of the Sahaba, they just absolutely hate Jews as Jews. Hence the videos of misbehavior on London streets. Whether or not progressive white college students agree or are simply useful idiots who truly believe they're fighting apartheid and the "victim" they're supporting really want a real multiethnic one-state solution...is a harder one.

But, even granting that, I don't know if it lets them off the hook. A decade ago the progressive line was "intention isn't magic" and now we have the Kendian view that anything that sustains disparities is racist regardless of reason or intention. There seems to be a double standard and absolute hysteria around Israel regardless

If your first instinct is to support the mass rape of Jews and to create ludicrous standards (Kyle Kulinski recently argued what's going on in the ME right now is worse than anything we've seen since the Nazis which is...) you are damned by the very standard you would use for your enemies.

demanding an end to the Jewish state

Should we only call Israel the Jewish state when painting them as a victim? I never hear the news write articles like this: “In 2014 alone, the Jewish nation killed more than one thousand Gazans in their bombing campaign against Gaza, 65% of which were civilians — nearly the same number of civilians killed in the Hamas incursion.” Would this be an acceptable way to write about Israel when they are being accused of misdeeds? “Questions arise as to whether the only officially Jewish country has bombed a hospital”. “The only country that is officially Jewish and run by Jews has been sanctioned by the UN more than any other country”. [edited spelling]

These people fundamentally see Hamas' attack as legitimate and Israel's response as illegitimate, because they see Israel itself as illegitimate, and they see Israel as illegitimate because it's a Jewish country. It's as clear and simple as that.

They also stole a hell of a lot of land from Palestinians and demolished their houses. I recall one American woman being run over by an Israeli bulldozer trying to prevent such an incident. There is also the matter of the internationally agreed borders and Israeli settlement beyond them. It's as clear and simple as Israeli actions - actions have consequences.

I recall one American woman being run over by an Israeli bulldozer trying to prevent such an incident.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I like it when activism has consequences. Makes the game for the next players higher stakes and spicier.

I recall one American woman being run over by an Israeli bulldozer trying to prevent such an incident.

I had never heard of this woman. Whether her cause was righteous and just or not, standing in front of a literal bulldozer is just an incredibly stupid thing to do. I'm not actually inclined to even grant that she was particularly brave, it seems more likely that she had simply learned the lesson in American activism that standing in front of heavy equipment will prevent it from operating.

Western activism.

People think that tank man was trying to stop the tanks from running over protestors. He wasn't; the tanks were going home at that point.

And let's be clear about what "Zionism" is. It's the belief that Israel should continue to exist.

Yes, that's the motte.

It's also, when probed, what is denied by many (most?) self-identified "anti-Zionists." Obviously, there are other anti-Zionist positions, e.g. Israel should not expand beyond its current borders or Israel should offer citizenship to Palestinians (perhaps just those in the West Bank and Gaza, perhaps those beyond as well who can prove ancestry). Those are bailies for anti-Zionists, though in my experience many of the more knowledgeable ones (typically Arabs) are quite frank that they just don't want Israel to exist.

These people fundamentally see Hamas' attack as legitimate and Israel's response as illegitimate, because they see Israel itself as illegitimate, and they see Israel as illegitimate because it's a Jewish country. It's as clear and simple as that.

No, not at all. It's because it's a colonizer country created by Western imperialists. These same protestors have the same attitude towards any colonial or post-colonial system. I guess you did notice that earlier, it's just that it didn't bother you maybe, as the target of their protests were white gentiles, not Jews, I don't know.

There's probably even a few people doing that! But it's not the bulk of what we're seeing.

What you're seeing is driven largely by what is most outrageous to see, and thus most likely to be shared and appear on your feeds and in the news. The people saying "damn this sucks, I don't even know what a good solution looks like but murdering innocent civilians in their homes for offenses committed by their countrymen doesn't seem like a good solution" are not having their opinions amplified to the whole world.

Maybe I just have an unusually levelheaded community, but most of the takes I've heard from people I actually know in real life look more like "damn this sucks, I hope it doesn't get too much worse" than for cheering for the deaths of Israeli or Palestinian civilians.

The people saying "damn this sucks, I don't even know what a good solution looks like but murdering innocent civilians in their homes for offenses committed by their countrymen doesn't seem like a good solution" are not having their opinions amplified to the whole world.

They're not running Penn, MIT, or Harvard either.

Are the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn calling for genocide, or are they instead refusing to act against the people who are?

Refusing to censor an idea isn't the same thing as supporting it. I would prefer if university presidents moved towards a policy of just not censoring bad ideas, but failing that I don’t think "let's pressure them to censor bad ideas from both sides" is likely to actually produce better outcomes.

Refusing to censor an idea isn't the same thing as supporting it.

By Progressives' own standards (applied fairly), it absolutely is; I see no reason not to apply that bad-faith standard in kind when it's inconvenient for them.

Are the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn calling for genocide, or are they instead refusing to act against the people who are?

I'm pretty sure that in the context of Palestinians killing Israelis, they haven't said "damn this sucks, I don't even know what a good solution looks like but murdering innocent civilians in their homes for offenses committed by their countrymen doesn't seem like a good solution". Which is what you just referred to.

Have they said anything at all in terms of object-level opinion about Israel and Palestine, as opposed to meta-level statements about the policies? Genuinely curious, maybe they have given object-level statements and I just haven't run across them.

Let's be blunt. The overwhelming majority of criticism of Israel is antisemitism.

That is extremely convenient. I find those arguments unconvincing when we talked about race issues and I find them unconvincing here. And even if rooted in antisemitism you still have to prove them wrong.

And let's be clear about what "Zionism" is. It's the belief that Israel should continue to exist.

But also it seems that Israel believes that it should not only exist but also expand. Facts on the ground in the west bank support this. So by your technique of argumentation - supporting Zionism means supporting expansion up to the Jordan border (and possibly beyond) which means genocide of Palestine people. So if you are for Zionism you are for genocide.

Edit: fixes a typo

So if you are not for Zionism you are for genocide.

Not sure that you meant to say this...

I'm all for a peace deal that establishes clear borders between the two sides. But for now it's meaningless to complain about Jews settling on Palestinian land because Palestine regards all of Israel as Palestinian land. It's absurd to insist that Israel abides by some deal that the other side refuses to accept, or that they must treat Ariel as different to Tel Aviv when the Palestinians maintain that both places are theirs.

because Palestine regards all of Israel as Palestinian land

Palestinians do, but there is no Palestinian government, so attributing intentions to a Palestinian state seems wrong. Of course, this adds to your point about the meaninglessness of "Jews settling on Palestinian land." There is land where people who identify as "Palestinians" live, but there is and has never been a "Palestine" (in the contemporary sense) to have land as Palestine. It's only marginally less misleading than talking of Utah as "Mormon land."

Hamas is literally the government of Gaza.

Exactly. Hamas is the government of Gaza, Fatah of the West Bank. There is no "Palestinian government" or functioning "Palestinian state," any more than there was a "German government" with civilian authority for the Allies to negotiate with in 1945 after Hitler and Goebbels killed themselves.

(There was the Flensburg government, but like Hamas, it lacked general authority over the territory it claimed.)

And let's be clear about what "Zionism" is. It's the belief that Israel should continue to exist. Anyone who describes themselves as "anti-Zionist" is demanding an end to the Jewish state, from which will inevitably follow an end to the Jewish population in the middle east. If you are not for Zionism, you are for genocide.

Such a great run up and you biffed it on the closer. I can believe both that nobody is entitled to their own country requiring the displacement of others and also that nobody should be genocided.

Also why are the Palestinians any different? Are anti-Palestinians not demanding an end to the Palestinian state and therefore the Palestinian population? Or is anyone not happy with the current state of affairs for genocide?

Let me be clear. I am happy to condemn both the atrocity Hamas committed on Oct 7th and the atrocities Israel has committed in response. I have no particular issue with people of Jewish ethnicity nor practitioners of Judaism as a religion. I am opposed to the existence of ethnostates everywhere and all the time. Insofar as the existence of Israel is predicated on the supremacy of Jewish individuals over non-Jewish individuals I am opposed to its continued existence in that form. I think ethnostates are illegitimate everywhere and always.

illegitimate everywhere and always.

Does the always also extend into the past?

I don't know why it wouldn't.

So the ethnically homogenous Greeks who looked down upon barbarians should've just let the ethnically heterogenous Persian empire that willingly assimilated them conquer them?

Ceasing being an ethnostate need not entail letting some other non-ethnostate conquer you.

It’s not a dejure ethnostate, there are millions of Arab citizens.

There were millions of black South Africans, Rhodesians and Americans during their apartheid governments.

The entire point of apartheid was that there weren’t any black South Africans, they were deported to bantustans which were granted independence under BVS puppet governments, blacks present in South Africa proper were there on work permits or as illegal immigrants.

Now of course the bantustans weren’t real countries even if South Africa pretended they were, but there are millions of Arab citizens of Israel and not Gaza or the West Bank in the same way there weren’t millions of black citizens of South Africa and not Bophuthatswana.

Which rights do Arab citizens lack?

Arab Israeli citizens have a right to vote, work, and move around freely.

Gaza and the West Bank are "apartheid" in the same sense in which Germans couldn't freely choose to work, move around, or vote in the US, UK, France, or USSR (but then again, neither could Soviet citizens...) after WWII. The German state had ceased to exist. The Palestinian state has never begun to exist. Palestine is occupied (in a very hands-off) way by Israel because there is no government of Palestine.

This is one of the problems with a "Two State Solution," which I favour. How do you have a two state solution with only one functioning state? You can say "Israel could take a more hands-off approach" so that a Palestinian state can emerge, but that's a lot to ask of Israel, given that Palestine is full of militants trying to kill as many Jews as possible.

The Allies allowed Germany to emerge from WW2 and even supported the development of German state institutions, but only AFTER Germans had stopped trying to kill the Allies.

So the best road to a Two State Solution, AFAIK, is Palestinian militants surrendering armed conflict and recognising Israel, on the condition of Israel at least permitting (even perhaps aiding) the emergence of a Palestinian state. I would also be fine with Jordan and/or Egypt taking over the West Bank/Gaza, under conditions of full recognition of Israel.

I would also be fine with Jordan and/or Egypt taking over the West Bank/Gaza, under conditions of full recognition of Israel.

They don't want it, at least not as long as the Palestinians are there.

Yes, it's not currently an option, but it's an example of a hypothetical solution that is not a standard Two State Solution.

I think ethnostates are illegitimate everywhere and always.

Why? I grew up in one. Still living in one - it is quite nice.

I take it you belonged to the "correct" race of whatever ethnostate this was.

While I agree with you that growing up in an ethnically homogenous community/state is nice and that the existence of such states is in theory legitimate, I recognize that this is not the current international consensus, and I applaud @Gillitrut for being consistent in his convictions. What annoys me more than anything is the blatant hypocrisy surrounding Israel: colonialism bad, apartheid bad, Lebensraum bad, blood and soil nationalism bad—but Israel good? If Rhodesia and the old South Africa government deserved to be sanctioned out of existence, Israel absolutely deserves it too. If the U.S. hadn’t done its best to destroy the former two countries’ governments, I would support Israel today. However, as things stand, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so “hey, hey, ho, ho, Israel has got to go.”

Rhodesia

Was basically an occupying regime, Rhodesia didn't have a longstanding White community. It would probably be better in the long run for everyone if it had remained under White minority rule, but it was literally a bunch of foreigners showing up and running the place, then declaring themselves independent when they had a falling out with the mother country.

old South Africa government

More complicated, including that the US was not actually trying all that hard to destroy the apartheid government when the decision to end apartheid was taken- apartheid ended due to internal politics caused by the demographic situation(as it turns out you cannot have 13% of the population oppressing the other 87% when the 87% get antsy)- and that apartheid sometimes justified itself as an ethnostate, but realistically it didn't want to be ethnically homogenous, it wanted large quantities of local black labor to exploit for the benefit of the White minority.

So no, neither of those are very directly comparable to Israel.

I won’t argue about Rhodesia, as I’m not that familiar with its history. I do, however, see similarities between its colonial start and that of Israel. They’re not identical, obviously, but I think at least somewhat similar.

I see more similarities with South Africa—especially with their Bantustans, which share a number of characteristics with the current Palestinian territories. And while you are correct that the US didn’t always try very hard to destroy their government (I spoke way too strongly earlier; mea culpa), they did refuse to sell them arms starting in the 1960s. In fact, after the 1977 international embargo, it seems that just about the only country that was willing to sell them weapons was Israel, which I’ll admit I find moderately significant. That fact on its own seems like weak evidence that Israel saw South Africa as a sympathetic country in some respects.

Either way, look at the United States’ different approaches. We refused to sell arms to South Africa, and we imposed on-again/off-again sanctions until their government fell. With Israel, we are happy to prop them up, sell them weapons, bribe their enemies to get along with them, and use our Navy to cow their enemies when that doesn’t work. If the United States had supported the South African government to the same extent that we support Israel’s, would it have collapsed? I’m inclined to say no. Alternatively, if we stopped supporting the Israeli government (not even sanctioned it; just stopped giving it free stuff!), would it collapse? Maybe, maybe not. It’s certainly more likely than it is as things stand now. (To be clear, I don’t actually want Israel to collapse; I just don’t want to use our treasure to stop it from happening. I say let them stand on their own two feet and what happens, happens.)

they see Israel as illegitimate because it's a Jewish country

This is tricky.

On the one hand, if Israel was in (say) previously-Canadian land I doubt Muslims or leftists would have a problem with it.

On the other hand I agree that most people who hate Israel probably hate Jews too (either due to poor decoupling or "friend of my enemy is my enemy" thinking).

On the other other hand, they probably wouldn't hate Jews if Israel was in Canada.

But goes the other way too and you can't be endlessly naive of who is using a phrase and what the implications of it actually are. Criticism of Israel gets poisoned by Hamas and other genocidal movements as much as by Zionists which means you have to actually be fairly specific about what you mean.

Why wouldn't this be an obvious case of dogwhistling hate speech, like posting "It's OK to be white" posters for example? Surely some people actually just believe it's OK to be white?

ETA: I agree they probably correctly deduced how their answers might be weaponized, but they still did I think a very poor job of providing a satisfactory answer. A difficult task, sure, but they're highly paid heads of administration. This is a core job duty for them.

Why wouldn't this be an obvious case of dogwhistling hate speech, like posting "It's OK to be white" posters for example? Surely some people actually just believe it's OK to be white?

I am not sure there's a principled reason they're different. Probably it is down to administrators priors about intention density in those using the phrase.

On the other, other, other hand, as a SWM I feel like the prisoner in the gallows in the "First time?" meme. You have a grievance at their hypocrisy, but I have a grievance at your hypocrisy. Most normie Jews have had no complaints at all about woke people saying similar or worse things about "white people."

If you will only accept allies that have been steadfastly consistent, you will never have enough allies to win.

I don't really think they are allies, is the problem. Just have a common antagonist, like US and USSR in WWII.

Completely agree. Israel’s plan to evacuate Palestinians to Europe and America should be proof enough of that.

Their performance was especially frustrating because they were taking a position that I basically support: that the University will not police opinions, even terribly offensive ones, but will police conduct and harassment. It's not that difficult a position to explain or defend on basic Millian principles, but they couldn't or wouldn't do it.

Because that's not their position, they do want to police opinions. If they state what you want them to, they'll open themselves to further questions about having policed non-progressive opinions, and tolerated harassment when the target was someone they didn't like.

This is probably what I think was most lacking from the 3min clip I saw. Should have gone straight to reversed hypotheticals or had a bank of actual, real world cases where they policed mere opinions. Start off with the most basic reversed hypothetical: "Would calling for the genocide of African Americans be a violation to the campus code of conduct?" Then move down the chain, even all the way to the meme, "Would displaying a poster saying, 'It's okay to be white,' be a violation of the campus code of conduct?" Get them on record. Double bonus points would be if they could point to actual examples on those campuses. In fact, that the questioner did not move to actual examples on those campuses of speech being policed makes me lean slightly more toward thinking that, in reality, the universities may be ever so slightly better on this score than I would have thought before, but that's perhaps only an epsilon movement, because I think that if I did take the time to dig in to past cases, we'd likely be able to show definite hypocrisy.

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