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Notes -
The following is a comment about US media, not about the war in Gaza.
Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.
I'm not shocked that Hamas doesn't surrender, but I am shocked that the option is never even mentioned in passing by the talking heads. Do they not think of it? Is it too far outside the bounds of normal discourse? If this were any other military conflict in all of history, it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.
It’s hard not to think the Palestinians are making the right choice given their political/tribal framework.
After all, is Razib not always telling us that almost all of us modern humans are the result of a thousand-person population bottleneck 100,000 years ago or whatever? From the perspective of tribal survival, a few highly fecund people surviving while preserving their identity is preferable to the whole population assimilating into global homogenization. Jews ourselves did this, it would have been easier at many points to assimilate, but it took until the 18th century for most of us to start (and even then, the future of the Jewish people is reliant on those who refused to do so), so one can only be so angry at the Arabs for doing the same.
The issue is more that the Palestinians know that Israel cannot fully eradicate them for political reasons, and therefore that from a game theoretical perspective, they only need to refuse to surrender for long enough that the ‘international community’ ie United States tells the Israelis to knock it off. Arguably nobody has done more to make actual genocide less internationally acceptable than Jews, so again this is largely a problem of our own making.
The final issue is that unlike in other tribal post-colonial populations, there is no group of ‘moderates’ who can be trusted to police the Palestinian population. Sure, Israel supported the Islamists against the ‘secular’ Arab-nationalists-with-socialist-characteristics, but the PLO was also a terrorist organization that had no problem killing Israeli civilians and had maximalist aims, so as distasteful as Islamism may be it’s not actually ‘worse’ than the alternative and, crucially, makes Palestinians less sympathetic for Western publics themselves dealing with Islamist terror.
The longstanding goal of Likud has been to find some other Arab nation to govern Palestinian Arabs in areas A and B and in Gaza. But while Israel’s Arab neighbors in Jordan and Egypt have no great fondness for Palestinian militants, they (smartly) choose to blanket refuse to govern the Palestinians, preferring to leave the problem in Israel’s hands.
The Kushner-MBS plan seems to have been (reading between the lines) for the Saudis to take on that duty, granting them the privilege of governing all three primary Islamic holy sites (the Kaaba in Mecca, Mohammed’s tomb in Medina and now Al Aqsa in Jerusalem) in exchange for policing the Palestinians. But that’s delayed now, a big success for Iran, so there are no good options for Israel.
As someone of gentile European descent, I'm descended from assimilated Celts and Germans, who were in turn descended from assimilated Bell Beaker people, who were descended from assimilated early European farmers and so on. Why do you need to keep your identity to survive? The Palestinians themselves were not always Arabs or Muslims.
Of course they could become another people and still reproduce, their lineages would still continue (albeit likely with far lower birthrates). But their identity would arguably be lost, which they seem to care about.
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