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Anti-semitism on the right really seems to be restricted to a bunch of fringe characters no one in power really wants to be publicly associated with, whereas it's now fully sanctioned by the portion of the left that sees life as a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. That's not even mentioning that it's probably the driving political issue for the left's most sanctified group (Muslims).
Elon Musk also seems a strange example of someone who might deter Jewish voters - my impression is that since his takeover X/twitter has been far less committed to maintaining the liberal party line and has consequently allowed lots more coverage of left-wing anti-semitic behaviour than would previously have been tolerated.
I would also imagine the possibility of Trump inviting the occasional weirdo to the WH is of less important to the Jews than the fact that he wouldn't keep publicly dressing down Israel like Biden's team has done.
I'm equally sure that pro-Israel Jews would prefer someone who moves aid forward while delivering a mild dressing-down for PR purposes to someone who praises Netanyahu to the skies while using aid as a lever to extract concessions elsewhere from his domestic political opponents. The Biden administration is significantly less critical of Netanyahu's policy in Gaza than the Israeli opposition, which most centrist American Jews find a lot more sympathetic than Likud.
American Jews would certainly prefer for Netanyahu to be deposed and a moderate Labor-led coalition that includes the Arab parties to come to power and recommit to immediately reopening negotiations about a two-state solution and the return of most West Bank settlers.
That is, however, a ridiculous pipe dream. The Israelis have radicalized and international pressure will radicalize them further still. The Israeli left is crushed utterly. Nobody believes peace is possible short of crushing the enemy now. That means American Jews will face a choice between disavowing Zionism utterly and embracing at least lukewarm support for a staunchly pro-Likud agenda that embraces Religious Zionism. Some will pick the former but Israel is important to most Jews and I suspect they will change politically rather than abandon Zionism.
Could you go into this in more detail? It might be worth a top-level post.
It's kind of an old conventional wisdom at this point, but the basic point is that late last century, the Israeli right and left were significantly divided by the question of how to deal with the Palestinian territories, and the Israeli left was discredited when withdrawal from militarily occupying Gaza led to its takeover and militarization by Hamas, ruining the Israeli-left security policy that peace could be achieved by making unilateral concessions to the Palestinians in the name of peace.
For a more extended version-
When the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in the Six-Day War in 1967, one of the reasons for seizing the territory was both as a military buffer, but also that they could be traded back for peace in the future. This is what happened with the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt, but for various reasons did not happen with the other territories.
Said reasons variously involved the fracturing of Pan-Arabism and the growing divides between the Palestinians and regional Arab states.
During the early cold war pan-arabism was a movement for a common Arab state which even saw some states voluntarily try to associate/join eachother, but ultimately inter-elite disagreements and the shocks of the Arab-Israeli wars fractured that movement to the point that Egypt, which had been one of the leaders of the Pan-Arab movement earlier, refused to take the Gaza Strip when it regained the Sinai as part of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The Egyptian position was that it's refusal was because it had never held Gaza as part of Egypt before the war, but a not-uncommon belief is that this was because Egypt didn't want the trouble of governing gaza / having to deal with the Palestinians / it made a useful thorn in Israel's side.
In the West Bank, Jordan renounced claims to the West Bank (which it had previously annexed) in the aftermath of the Black September civil war, when the PLO (who was present in Israeli-occupied Israel as well as Jordan) attempted to overthrow the King of Jordan in 1970. The Kingdom of Jordan won that, but the PLO remained in the Israeli-occupied territories, and in 1974, the Arab Leage recognized the PLO- and not Jordan- as the sole representative of the Palestinians, and compelled Jordan to recognize a Palestinian independent of Jordan. Jordan would later formally renounce claims in 1988, as part of cutting monetary expenditures and dissolving a lower house of legislature that was half composed of constituencies in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, i.e. Palestinians. Jordan and Israel would go on to establish relations in 1994, without needing any sort of concession of the West Bank back to Jordan, who it had been captured from in the first war.
What this meant is that come the 90s, when the Cold War was ending and there was no US-Soviet context to the middle east conflict, Israel had achieved peace with its immediate neighbors it had conquered Palestinian territory from, without having actually to trade back Palestinian territory as part of the deal. However, this peace between states wasn't the same as peace: the First Intifada at about the 20 year anniversary of the 1967 war in 1987-1990 was years of violence / murders / increased unrest, and it was clear that it could happen again. As a result, Israeli politics shifted to a question of how to resolve the Palestinian issue. This was the... not start, but how the Two State solution took new life in the post-Cold War environment, with the Left and the Right disagreeing on how to approach it, or whether even if it should.
An oversimplification of this is that the Israeli left was vehemently onboard with the two state solution, and more associated with making compromises- or even unilateral concessions- to advance negotiations. The Israeli right was far more skeptical, alternatively wanting terms that would functionally limit Palestinian sovereignty in their own state (no military allowed, right for Israeli incursion against groups attacking from Palestinian soil) or not wanting to have to do it at all. Then there was how settler politics played into both parties, as settlers were both a way to secure territory that might not have to be returned due to changing facts on the ground (the Israeli right), but also a bargaining chip that could be traded away at the negotiating table (the Israeli left), and of course an actor in their own right.
The so-what here is that in the late 90s, the Israeli left had an politically ascendant moment. Prime Minister Ehud Barak of the Labor Party came into office, at the same time that Bill Clinton was still in office, and they were relatively like-minded enough to put together the Camp David Summit... whose failure was one of the triggering events for the Second Intifada. The exact reasons why it failed are subject to dispute / position / your belief on what Yasser Arafat could actually deliver on behalf of the PLO, but from a more common Israeli perspective, this was a sincere effort with politically-damaging offers at the sort of land-swaps that had been a functional base of negotiations for a good while, and it not only failed, but it blew up into another 5 years of violence.
Part of what ended the 5 years of violence was the Israeli-PLO Sharm El Sheikh Summit of 2005, where President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority- the same Abbas still in power today- had assumed power from Arafat. And this was in part because not only had Arafat died in 2004- and so robbed the Palestinian movement of one of its unifying figures- but in 2004 the Israelis had also done a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
While the Second Intifada was a blow to the credibility of the Israeli left, the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is what I'd consider to have been the fatal blow to the Israeli left.
While it was conducted by Ariel Sharon- who at the time was part of the conservative/right-wing Likud party- it was so controversial a policy that Sharon's faction left Likud and established the central-liberal Kadima party, which attracted a number of the Labour party members as well. It was as such a policy that was identified with the left/center-left in spirit and practice, as not only was it's proponents the dominant leftist political force of the era, but it was a quid done for no quo. Israeli infrastructure was left behind, including things like greenhouses, and while for awhile it could have been argued that it set conditions for the cease fire the year after, which probably had something to do with Kadima's victory in 2006 to top the government- i.e. the political reward for ending the Second Intifada through good leftist political wisdom, bravery, and...
...and a year later, in 2007, Hamas completed its takeover of Gaza Strip after its own 2006 electoral victory by throwing PLO officials off of skyscrapers, and began a sustained rocket campaign into Israel. By January 2008, it was up to hundreds of rockets a month. The rocket campaign would more or less go on until the Gaza War of 2009-2010, after which the rockets... never went away, but were more varying, and a constant source of tension and unease. For as bad as the Intifada was, it wasn't that degree of regularity in rocket attacks on a weekly basis.
As a result, in Israeli politics, the Gaza Withdrawal became the political kryptonite of the left, a sort of feckless concession that made things worse. Prime Minister Netanyahu first assumed power in 2009 as a result of running on a tough-on-security policy, and ever since the decades of 1990s and 2000s have been the death knell of the Israeli left. After running and winning on the post-cold-war optimism of the 90s, the ideological basis of the leftest approach to Palestinian negotiation/conciliation was discredited. Not only were perceived-as-sincere offers of trades and concessions not only rejected but answered with an Intifada, but further unilateral concessions to amoliate even that only served to facilitate even more violence by even more dedicated partisans.
The Israeli left, associated with both conciliatory approach to the Palestinians (that visibly failed) and a commitment to a two-state solution lost a political generation as Netanyahu spun in power. In so much as they could define themselves still as an alternative to the right, the Israeli left was still defined by its commitment to a Two State solution, and thus as the respectable political faction that outsiders (like various US administrations) could like and work with...
And Oct 7 has rendered even that an albatross, because arguments for a two-state solution with the people who relished in their own ISIS-level brutality doesn't go down well with the electorate. For all that Netanyahu is unpopular and is unlikely to survive the death of his reputation as an effective security providor, Netanyahu is unpopular as a man. The two state solution is now unpopular as even an idea, and that is practically the most defining distinction of the Israeli left in some circles.
Or so the story goes. Perspectives and recollections may differ.
Thanks!
I didn't realize it had gotten that bad in the last few decades. I'd assumed that the Israeli left had come up with a different vision, but it sounds like they never did?
I'd heard talk about Netanyahu being unpopular and his coalition being shaky, prior to Oct 7, but from what you say it doesn't seem like there's anything coherent that could replace him? It's just "stomp hard" or "stomp harder"... :-(
Ye are welcome.
There's always going to be different visions, but there's also a reason that Israeli politics over the last several years began to center around removing Netanyahu as an individual than on the security front. Even in that the Left is damaged goods in that while Netanyahu is almost certainly corrupt, there's nothing particularly partisan-unique about it. Olmert, the guy who was PM for 2006-2009 as sort of the last gasp of the Israeli left, was under corruption prosecution and convicted in a prolonged chain of events that lasted until 2017, making that a non-contrast per see.
Ultimately, the Israeli left's different vision on the security front has always been the importance of the Two State solution both as a matter of appropriateness, as an argued necessity for normalizing relations with the rest of the Arab world, and as key to maintaining relations with the West. However, there again history and the right did no favors: Oct 7 dissuades that a truly autonomous Palestinian polity wouldn't use said autonomy to attack, and one of the purposes of Oct 7 was to disrupt the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that Netanyahu was nearly achieving despite the dogma. Which leaves the claim of being necessary to maintain relations with the west, which is a fair bit more contentious and starts going into your perspective of the effectiveness of the Israel lobbying and Palestinian protest movements in the West especially since Oct 7.
Before or after 7 October?
Before 7 October, the argument was (and still is) that Netanyahu was preventing the two state solution from solving the issue, so the alternative was to re-commit to the two state solution process. This was just part of the host of the anti-Netanyahu coalition, which included the 'I'm strong on defense but not as corrupt' alternative, the 'Israel should be more secular' perspective, and so on. But no, there was no particular coherent alternative on, say, the West Bank issue, where the politics and the various military / strategic / ideological rationals for the settlements have their own mass and inertia in Israeli politics, but the left wasn't going to do a unilateral withdrawal after how the much smaller Gaza strip worked out.
After 7 October, the main differentiating question is what to do with the Gaza Strip after anti-Hamas operations conclude, which itself is going to depend on what specific context they conclude under. There is anything from outright military occupation, to turning it back over to the PLO eventually, to a multinational security force to keep the peace. There are downsides to all of these, but I also don't believe there's anything coherent enough to match a left/right divide, not least because it's still not clear what context the war will end in.
Yeah, it seemed like the Palestinians were gradually being discarded by the governments of Arab/Muslim states (except perhaps Iran), even if the general population still cared. It reminds me of the way the Chinese government cracks down on nationalist revanchism every so often: partly it's that they don't actually want to invade Taiwan/wherever at this particular moment, but also it feels like they're setting things up so that they get to play "good cop" in international relations ("if you don't work with us, we might lose some domestic legitimacy, and then we'd have to appease those people").
Thanks for providing an infodump. I'm somewhat new here, and I confess that I don't know your position on this whole mess, but you seem like a calm and reasonable person. So I'm going to ask a couple more questions on sensitive topics, in case you still feel like answering. If you don't want to, I completely understand.
I've seen a few videos that appear to be of harmless Gazans being shot dead. I don't think they're fakes. What's up with that? And why aren't they viewed as more of a Abu-Ghraib-level scandal by Israelis and supporters of Israel? I worry that Israeli society has fallen to the level that American society did shortly after Sep 11, where pretty much anything could be justified, and almost no one was willing to dissent. And that parts of the IDF are taking out their anger and frustration in ways that are more about personal vengeance than about any strategic purpose. Here's the two worst ones that I've seen; they're old but they've stuck in my mind. I haven't had the heart to look for more recent ones, and none have been forced into my attention, but I don't know whether that's because they stopped happening, or whether they're just better hidden. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-slams-uk-network-after-claim-unarmed-gazan-was-shot-dead-shortly-after-interview/ https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/26/middleeast/hala-khreis-white-flag-shooting-gaza-cmd-intl/index.html
It seems that factions in Israel supported the initial incarnation of Hamas, decades ago, in order to destabilize the PLO/Fatah. What's your take on that? To me, it seems like either a short-sighted plan that backfired (much like assassinating heads of state, in hopes that whatever replaces them is more controllable), or an extremely cynical ploy to eliminate compromise in favor of the preferred extreme solution. (None of which should be read as relieving Gazans of their ethical responsibility for their own actions.)
Thanks again, in advance, for even considering a response.
Well, I'll let you keep your good opinion a little longer, but I do have my irritation points. But in the spirit of trying to good faith questions-
One of the dominant trends of Arab/Muslim resistance movements over the last few decades has been a general commitment to blend-end strategies where rather than clearly identifiable uniforms insurgents will wear civilian clothes so they can pass for harmless civilians as soon as they ditch the weapons and adjust their clothes, and one of the trends of this conflict in particular is that Hamas has a strategy of maximizing civilian casualties by various forms. Hamas has a long habit of using human shield strategies in various ways, whether from launching rocket attacks from civilian residences while preventing the civilians from fleeing (so that Israel would be blamed for killing civilians in their homes if they counter-fire) to using civilians as couriers / carriers / observors supporting the armed members, and so on. The purpose of these types of strategies are exploit rules of engagement restricting fires in order to gain asymetric advantages, and to generate/exploit propaganda when the other side shoots back. To be clear- shooting people who appear to be harmless civilians is not actually against the laws of war if they are assisting a belligerant power, and there are tactics to deliberately conflate the categories.
There is no Abu-Ghraib-level scandal because this is a very well established, and not at all novel, tactic, and one which Hamas and the supporters of Hamas regularly acknowledge even as it obviously leads to more risk to civilians who might actually be honest neutrals. The Pro-Palestinian position is that the onus is on the Israelis to distinguish, even as the pro-Israeli position is that the onus is on the Palestinians to not deliberately obfusicate the differences. And given that the Hamas strategy as a whole is to run up the civilian casualty count in order to drive an international response against Israel, and that they will continue to do so, there's no real point to viewing it as a Abu-Ghraib scandal when no amount of Israel discretion will prevent the opportunity for video propaganda to be generated.
Further- and in a broader sense- if you accept that you need to stop a person with a bad practice, you have to be willing to endure the bad practice which the opponent will invoke in order to deter you. This is the classic 'if you are known to succumb to blackmail, your blackmailer will continue to blackmail you' except with civilian collateral. The casualties become scandals more in the contexts of mindsets where Israel is not accepted to have a need/right to stop Hamas that justies tolerating casualties (that Hamas will generate as a matter of strategy).
Note that this makes no claim on the veracity of any videos you may have seen, or whether they are/are not war crimes. However, video propaganda is very easy to generate since the presenter is the one who gets to present context and can remove it via editing or simply lack other perspectives needed for context on specific issues. A X minute video will rarely provide insight as to what happened Y minutes before the video.
The answer to both is yes. This is what happens when major trauma shocks hit a national culture, and this was an expected and intended result of the Hamas attack planning, as the propaganda strategy of, during, and since has been tailored to incite Israeli retaliation.
I find it unpersuasive.
It is a common refrain that moves agency to the Israelis rather than the Palestinians, a hyperagency versus hypoagency issue where the hyperagent's influence is treated as far more significant than local agent actions reducing them to the role of recipient. It's politically convenient and a sort of emotional cope for Israeli political opponents in the aftermath of a demonstrated lack of control to claim the current situation is actually the result of control by bad leaders, and it's also politically convenient and a form of morality laundering for opponents of Israel in general to claim that the Palestinian actions on 7OCT is really the responsibility of Israel leaders with agency. Agency arguments are a format by which moral responsibility is reduced from the hypoagent not on the basis of their individual morality, but subordinating it to structural paradigms that allocate moral responsibility for hypoagents who, by their nature, have the agency to act.
But the truth is nothing about what the Israels did in that theory dictated the results of 7OCT, or even that Hamas would win the Hamas-PLO power struggle by throwing PLO leaders off skyscrapers after a decisive electoral thumping when Gazan-Palestinians voted out a PLO broadly seen as corrupt and unpopular. There were many, many years of intervening choices, decisions, options, and failures by various actors that were required to reach the point. Selectively choosing to focus on one isn't particularly good analysis, even if it makes for good propaganda, because results and consequences are rarely so clear cut. (To be clear, they sometimes do- Osama Bin Laden directly changed his practices when a US Congressperson said on TV that the US was listening to his phone, which directly led to improved secrecy needed for 9-11, but these are much more often the exception than the norm in multi-agent problems.)
You are also using the much mis-used concept of blowback, which presents negative consequences in present times as a consequence of decisions in the past who are deemed bad because they resulted in negative consequences. However, blowback is banal when treated well, but can quickly become stupid when treated as something to avoid entirely because there is no such thing as major policies with no future costs. That framing of blowback is a bad decision analysis model, because it's retroactive rationalization that assumes clear causality (it judges people on how complex contexts turned out as if they should have known this would happen, when people don't actually make decisions with the benefit of knowing how all future things will unfold), because it negates the relevance of many other factors that contribute to a situation (Hamas was more popular than the PLO in the Gazan elections in part because running on a platform of genocide the jews is popular with the Gazan electorate, and in part because PLO was unpopular due to being corrupt, but not because Israel didn't target it as harshly decades ago- an alteranative genocide-the-jews party would still have had the conditions to succeed), and because it doesn't accept that even good / well justified strategies can deliver significant costs.
Just as a concept, think of strategy games with strategies which allow you to trade health / casualties / debuffs in exchange for potentially advantageous options: the costs and the benefits are both real, and inseparable, but the presence of costs doesn't mean it was an inferior option. You could expect to face equivalent of worse costs. However, pop-culture blowback analysis would be to fixate on the costs tied to the policy, and ignore / pretend that other costs wouldn't have happened if you chose the other options. To pick a video game trope, consider the habit of many players to not use their healing potions in RPGs because they might need it later in a tough boss fight. As a result, they either risk losing in a current fight for not using the resource, or they spend a lot of time grinding so they don't need the resource in the current fight when they could have spent the same time in a later area gaining more XP and better loot if they'd just pushed forward. Blowback analysis is the equivalent of critiquing the players who used the rare potion earlier because they did need one of those later, regardless of if they're in a better position or not (i.e. in an area where rare potions are easier to find with less grind).
To very much simplify how to evaluation policy decisions and strategies, the basis of merit of a choice isn't if bad results occur- it's whether more or worse bad results occur compared to the plausible alternative choices. Note that one of the points of a strategy for dividing the PLO would be so that no single Palestinian faction could cause a two-front war with a single call to uprising... and note that the current conflict is not a two front war. Would this have occurred if the nebulous organization of Hamas was defeated/absorbed into the PLO, creating a stronger for-war wing of the PLO? After the PLO was central Israeli in the first two Intifadas? You can't just assume that if the PLO had successfully absorbed the Hamas-minded parts of Palestinian society, it would have retained the same internal political balances that led to it's current status and avoided all the conflicts that Hamas wanted but it didn't.
To put it in different terms- is the current Gazan War an Israeli strategy failure, for there being a conflict, or a success, for a conflict being far smaller and more manageable than it would otherwise be?
And by similar alternatives: was the surprising success of Oct 7 and terribly delayed Iraeli response a Hamas strategic victory, for doing better than it expected, or was it in fact a strategic disaster, because it failed to ignite the regional conflict that they were aiming for in part due to the nature of the propaganda effect of doing better than expected?
Blowback analysis can't answer either of these, because it treats any blowback as proof of failure (or else it wouldn't be blowback), has no mechanism for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable costs, and no consistency for what it deems blowback to focus on.
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