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Haven't you noticed by now?

Anything done by anyone Jewish, or any cause that might be interpreted as positive for Israel, is inherently sinister and evil.

It really is quite tiresome.

Mainly at the level where I think, boy, it'd be really nice to read the Motte without the same two or three people every time yelling about the Jews.

Could we maybe have a few days' break from people repeating their theory that everything bad that has ever happened is due to the Jews? Oh no, I stubbed my toe, those damn Jewish elites! It's worse than incorrect - it's boring.

Oh, I have no doubt that it's true that wealthy individuals pressured Columbia in this way, and the fact that the individuals in question were disproportionately Jewish is unsurprising, since for very obvious reasons Jewish people are disproportionately likely to support Israel and to oppose the Palestine protests.

But I'm not blind. I can see the way that coffee_enjoyer specifically framed this around Jewish billionaires, and given that he is one of the small group of people on the Motte obsessed with Jews, the implication is not exactly subtle. In the top-level post he quite explicitly presents this as support for alt-right theories about secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation and so on.

I'd just like to maybe go a week without a bunch of people blaming everything on the Elders of Zion, you know?

Respectively,

  1. Nothing is being molded by anyone. Petition for redress of grievances is business as usual.
  2. If it is illegal then it is newsworthy, but what law is being broken and by what conduct?
  3. BLM is not the other side from the pro Hamas protests; it is the same side. Both are illegal and both should have been dispersed by police immediately. If it was MAGA protesters they would have been.

The big media outlets don't seem to be interested in this story. Maybe that is because they are controlled by a Jewish syndicate, or maybe it is because it isn't a big deal. I go with "isn't a big deal". If they were conspiring to break the law that would be a big deal; if they were conspiring to change the law it would be at least interesting -- but what is happening here is that they are "conspiring" to enforce the law -- which they would already be enforcing, with prejudice, if a group on the other side were doing the same thing. So, so what?

You and SecureSignals can keep telling yourselves that, but it's a strange narrative that ignores the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the first time the Arab states tried to push Israel into the sea.

I wasn't intending to ignore it (and I reject whatever you are trying to hint at by lumping me in with SecureSignals), but looking at the Israeli-side list of "commanders and leaders" on Wikipedia, some two thirds of them were straight up born in Europe, and the remaining ones were born during the British administration to parents who are listed as such. This parses as invaders being expelled, not as people defending their homes.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The people promptly elected Hamas as their champions, and Hamas used that power to make war on Israel by firing rockets. Israel basically just withstood this (and built Iron Dome) for many years, until October 7.

I am quite aware of this, but as I think I argued at length I don't see any moral obligation on the people Israel crammed into Gaza to not elect a government that loathes Israel and will lob rockets into it. This list does not look like "basically just withstood this" either; the list is punctuated with fantastically disproportionate statements like "Israel launches a 22-day military offensive in Gaza after rockets were fired at the southern Israeli town of Sderot. About 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis killed before a ceasefire is agreed upon.".

My honest guess is an overrepresentation of jews and they are overrepresented in the posts on the conflict. Add on to this a large overrepresentation of Americans who have grown up in a society that is almost religiously pro Israel. I think a lot of the justifications for Israel starts with support for Israel and then the arguments are constructed to justify the belief. It is more akin to the support of a football team than a political position.

I have met people who are pro Israel because they want to own the libs. How being on the same side as the ADL and JIDF owns the libs is beyond me.

Israel support is also a safety valve for ventilating anger towards non whites. Back in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars era I met several people who signed up just because they wanted to ventilate their anger caused by immigration. That the wars ended up causing mass immigration to Europe didn't seem to bother them. We get this sentiment a lot in Europe. People who would never say the word repatriation and talk about how migrants have to come here legally will happily cheer on bombing Gaza because they just want to see the cousins of their migrants get killed. Advocating for doing 2% of what Israel does in the suburbs of France isn't politically acceptable so we can bomb their relatives in the middle east causing another refugee crisis.

For those people like you (@4bpp) who I assume does not actually want the destruction of Israel, what do you see as a solution?

I honestly think that either of the two no-state solutions might be long-term preferable to the perpetual continuation of what we have now. Most of the Jewish population of Israel would find its bearings in the West very quickly, and I think that a future repeat of Nazi Germany or conditions in other countries around then seems exceedingly unlikely; on the other hand, giving Israel free hand to completely wipe out the Palestinians would be the solution that in German idiom one would call a "horrible end, instead of a horror without end", and certainly would make for an interesting addition to our collective consciousness.

In more realistic and less edgy terms, I think that radically redrawing the borders of Israel and Palestine for a two-state solution that hurts both of them, perhaps surrendering half of Jerusalem and everything to the south of a line linking Gaza to it to a Palestinian state in return for everything north of it, performing full population transfer and deploying international troops enforcing the border (and possibly also a temporary "colonial regime" to "dehamasify" the Palestinian state, run not by the Israelis but by some far-removed and suitably ruthless third party like the Chinese, or even the Saudis), would in fact be achievable and likely solve the problem. The problem of Israel and Gaza as I see it is that Israel can not actually curb its cupidity towards Palestinian lands, Gaza as a state is geographically unviable (unlike the West Bank), and the Palestinians are forced to interact with Israelis for key needs as they do not have a fully independent state or economy, producing resentment-breeding interactions such as Palestinian workers having to undergo daily invasive searches as they leave their open-air prison settlement to work on non-autonomy land and in turn getting to scam and sass the Israelis in their cheap car repair shops. (Both things I've observed when visiting Israel.)

Israelis have made at least some attempts to ease up on the Palestinians and let them try to build a society, and every such easing up has resulted in more suicide bombings or October 7.

The "easing up" looked like thousands of Palestinians being killed in retaliation for a single-digit number of Israelis killed every few years. Going just by raw numbers, in the back-and-forth of action and reaction, it really looks a lot like the Israelis are constantly escalating and the Palestinians are constantly deescalating - there is not a single instance of Palestinians killing Israelis that was not followed by Israelis killing more Palestinians, and no single instance of Israelis killing Palestinians that was not followed by Palestinians killing fewer Israelis. Yet this is somehow being painted into an emotional picture of the Israelis trying to make peace, as the Palestinians escalate and push for war. It is very hard to avoid the temptation to interpret this reframing as stemming from an underlying feeling that in terms of weregeld an Israeli is worth about a thousand Palestinians.

Well, I think it's just a fact to begin with that Jews are very heavily overrepresented in industries like media and finance. There are a number of ways to account for that historically, going back centuries to the only trades Jews were permitted in the Middle Ages, to the effects of Jewish settlement clustered around media centres (most famously New York), or even just the way that, as a culture with strong internal bonds and high in-group trust and a heavy focus on education, Jews were naturally set up to do well in modern society and benefitted from unusually strong patronage networks.

Where I start to get suspicious is where Jews in particular are singled out and other groups, which might be equally disproportionately represented, are not. I suppose an obvious example would be the composition of the US Supreme Court, which has been utterly dominated by Catholics for a while - it's currently six Catholics, two Protestants (one of whom was raised Catholic), and one Jew, and it's not been that long since it was six Catholics and three Jews. How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination? There are some theories I find plausible (in particular I note that Catholicism and Judaism are both religions with a heavy emphasis on law, so it makes sense that their practitioners might more of an affinity for become lawyers; this bodes badly for Protestants on the court in the future, but might imply that Muslims will do well), but what I find more striking is how few people seem to care. It's not as if anti-Catholic conspiracies are foreign to American history; yet there is no discussion of this at all.

Likewise there are other ethnic groups that are noticeably overrepresented in terms of wealth or power in the US. Setting aside the obvious modern ones (Indians are currently the top, I think?), I believe e.g. Scottish-Americans used to do extraordinarily well. Yet there is no particular interest in this today.

I grant, as a starting point, that Jews have done very well in the media in the US and probably in the UK (though I am less familiar with the British context). I think it's probably fair enough to have a frank discussion about that.

But what I am frankly not comfortable with is when that discussion seems to be, in my judgement, motivated by a hatred of Jews as such that appears prior to any evidence, or even prior to any attempt to treat Jews as ordinary people or fellow citizens. I think my starting point for talking about the particular history of the Jews is that no one's coming into the dialogue massively prejudiced. And unfortunately that is not a bar that everyone meets.

This is true to a point. It is also true that Israel was once far larger than it is today. The Israelis captured huge swathes of land through force of arms in defensive wars, and has mostly returned that land peaceably. The Israelis left the Gazans to their own devices in 2005. The common narrative that Israel is constantly expanding is ahistorical.

I don't accept "defensive" (would you label Russia's Ukraine war thus as well? After all, Ukraine was constantly attacking Russia's acquisitions in the Donbass), and if you keep seizing x units of land and then returning x/2 of them as a "gesture of goodwill" when settling with a thoroughly defeated adversary, this doesn't register as things being a wash regarding your expansionism.

I see this logic - not that I agree with it, but I see it. What I don't see is how your logic is not fully generalizable to the Israelis. They have also been wronged by Palestinian actions. How can it be in your paradigm that Palestinians have the right to invade Israel and kill every Jew they see, but then the Israelis do not have the right to bring indiscriminate death down upon the Palestinians in retaliation? (for the record, I do not believe either of them have the right to do this, nor do I believe that Israel's response has been indiscriminate.)

As I argued in a parallel response to @RobertLiguori, I perceive an asymmetry between initating unjustified violence and retaliating to it. If the Palestinian actions that wronged the Israelis were morally just, then any given act of retaliation for them is at least significantly less just than if the prior action were not. On top of all of this, even just looking at casualty figures, the Israeli retaliation for any Palestinian action is wildly out of proportion - generally, any conflict seems to look like "Palestinians killed n Israelis; thereupon Israel killed 100n Palestinians, with another 5n Israeli soldier casualties".

While I don't think the analogy is particularly fair, I will point out that there is only one moral paradigm in which the shooter in your story is unambiguously justified, and that is blood feud. That is inherently a might-makes-right morality. The shooter will soon find out the hard way that that the Mafia have no more scruples than he when it comes to killing children.

Why are blood feuds might-makes-right, except for the trivial sense that if you don't even have the might to take a potshot at the enemy team's weakest spot then you are really left with no recourse? Either way, blood feuds seem to have been the default mode of justice for functioning human societies for the overwhelming part of human history. I understand that they are questionable from the perspective of someone living in a functioning modern state and we have found approaches to justice that work better, but all of these presume that there actually is a functioning state that is willing and able to mete out non-blood-feud justice. The whole conundrum of the Palestinians is that there isn't - nobody could judge the Israelis for driving them out of their homes, levelling their cities or killing them in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Any candidate sovereign that could force the parties into court by force of arms is making a show of looking away and whistling. In this setting, blood feuds empirically seem like the best social technology that humanity has discovered.

Then unless you fall into your own bullet one above, you've got your justification not just for Israel's extremely restrained and humane war, but for actual full-on retaliation.

This description of the war does not match with my perception of reality, either based on casualty figures or the pictures that I see. Even the most dedicated pro-Israelis concede that Palestinian casualties have always far exceeded Israeli ones, but Israel's war is the "extremely restrained" one?

Either way, I think there is a basic asymmetry between unjustified violence and retaliation. If person A chops off person B's arm and everyone else around looks away and says that A is in their right to do that, then B has been wronged. If B then chops A's arm off in retaliation, B was justified in doing so. If A chops B's other arm off in retaliation for that, this is not justified, because justified violence does not beget a similar right to retaliation.

There is no ethical principle other than "Whites bad" (or other general Who, Whom?) that condemns Israel while not condemning not just the Palestinians, but the vast majority of the Arab countries for their historic displacements and exterminations of Christians and Jews.

Please exercise the minimum of good faith to grant me that I am not approaching this from an ethnic perspective. I don't see where Christians come into this, but historical wrongs committed by Arabs against Jews seem like a better candidate for something that would justify the actions around Israel's establishment. This is an area where I have to admit relative ignorance, but my sense was that the scattering of the Jews of the Levant was largely at the hand of "Western" powers, starting with the Roman empire, and that actually Arab suzerains treated them better throughout history than the crusaders that would occasionally insinuate themselves into the region; and either way, any hostilities experienced by remnant resident Jewish population were out of proportion with the injustices visited upon the resident Arabs by the invading European Israelis. Because of the disconnect between the principal agents of Jews' displacement to Europe (the Romans) and the current "targets of retaliation" (the Arabs), who moved into the post-Roman vacuum much later, I find it hard to accept that the latter would have any moral culpability for what the Jews suffered in the European diaspora.

As a calibration question, I'm curious what you think of the Allies's campaign in WWII. Do you sympathize with the modern Neo-Nazi arguments that the firebombing of Dresden was an abomination, that the mass destruction of civilian life is never justified, and thus Nazi resistance to Allied occupation was justified then and justified now? Were the lives of the German civilians that died in Dresden precious enough that the war effort should have been forestalled?

No, not particularly, because as I said above there is an asymmetry between first-mover violence and retaliation. Since I don't accept the Nazi argument that starting WWII was proportionate retaliation for Versailles, they are the ones who moved first, with the civilian population as both an intended beneficiary and enthusiastic supporter of their actions. I would go even beyond the publicity-friendly rationalisation by military need and say that the Allies would morally not be so wrong to murder those civilians out of pure revenge. (Though actually still a bit less so than the Gazans, because they had more options to make Germany and Germans pay available to them at the time than the Gazans had wrt Israel!) To dispel any attempts to put a racial angle on this, I would say the same about the firebombing of Tokyo.

"Jews are literally all organized criminal gangsters, down to the children."

Ugh, I didn't anticipate that using that particular metaphor would invite this interpretation. The only reason I reached for it is that mafia/police collusion was the first trope I could think of where the protagonist is subjected to injustice and can't get succour. What matters for the metaphor is not even the collusion among the mafiosi, but the collusion between them and the police (the US + vassals). Would you be happier if I changed the stand-in for Israel to be a single guy who has a small frontier town's police and judges in his pocket, with a single pampered daughter who had a cushy upbringing thanks to what he racketeered from some townspeople?

adoration for murderous, rapey barbarians

Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat. Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

Women love a killer

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.

This post is actually a pretty clean example of exactly what we don't want people posting, here. I am familiar with the evidence I would expect you to provide in support of each of your claims, but you didn't actually do so. And even if you had, your rhetoric simply comes in too sweeping and too hot. The tone is all wrong; you're not discussing a culture war topic, you're waging culture war.

You've stacked some AAQCs which have somewhat shielded you, but the number of warnings for low effort booing on your account is getting cumbersome. This time it's a three day ban.

Absolutely! Ban everyone (other than the Nazi-hobbyists with the time on their hands to couch their points in interminable gish-gallops) and you will not have anymore inflammatory comments to deal with! (tappinghead.gif)

Keep up the good work guys.

Palestinians seem to think so, since they typically demand hundreds or even thousands of Palestinian prisoners be released for each Israeli (a price Israel has paid in the past). If that's the price you set, unfortunately you set yourself up for the same equation in war.

Well yeah, I figure everyone involved feels like this. That doesn't mean it's a good state of affairs.

Maybe, but why should they accept being turned out of their country to become refugees somewhere else? In what world would a people who won every war waged against them surrender to their defeated enemies and abandon what is now their homeland? What other descendants of colonists are ever asked to do this? Even Americans are told we should make reparations to Native Americans, not all pack up and move back to Europe. This just seems like a very non-serious proposal.

I mean, the premise of the entire debate is that right now we are being told that it is our moral imperative to pour large quantities of arms and equipment into Israel and also invest further resources and subvert our (codified or apparent) principles to help it break the backs of any Palestine supporters on our territory. I think there is a gap between "tell them to surrender when they are winning" and "stop doing whatever it takes to make sure that they keep winning" that you are glossing over here, and I'm advocating for the latter, not the former.

Again, this is the sort of solution that works if you are King of the World and can wave a wand and make it happen.

Not quite - I am assuming for the sake of argument that Israel actually needs the support that they demand from us. If they can win just as well without us giving it to them and we don't actually have any leverage, why are we still giving it to them? Conversely, if Israel can't survive without Western support in the long term, as both Israel and the Western governments seem to assert in public, why can't we dictate terms to them?

US financial aid to Israel alone is around 3 billion USD a year. Considering that the US occupation of Afghanistan only cost about 20-40 billion per year according to estimates, I'm sure that a colonial administration of Palestine, which is much smaller and easier to reach, could be implemented for the same sum, and Palestinians would surely be an easier population to work with than Afghans.

The "disproportionate response" argument has never seemed very relevant to me. There is no Rule of War that you're only "allowed" to kill a similar number of people in response to some of your people being killed. Palestinians only kill fewer Israelis because they have fewer weapons - you can bet if Hamas could level Tel Aviv they would. It's not "deescalation" when they simply don't have the capability to kill as many Israelis as they would like.

Calling what the Palestinians did deescalation was admittedly polemic, but I do mean to insinuate that it is strange to call what Israel does deescalation. If an angry baby kicks you wiuth murderous animal intent (achieving nothing), are you, as an adult, "deescalating" if you merely break the baby's arm instead of throttling it as you easily could? Most people would surely say no; both intended and achieved/achievable damage have to figure into what is considered an escalation.

It is absolutely ridiculous that a neoghbouring state would be allowed to rain missiles on your civilians without retaliation

Apart from this sentence being almost perfectly constructed to invite the "which of the two do you mean, now?" response - allowed by whom? I don't mean to presume to tell the Israelis what they can and can't do, but the main thing being discussed is whether I (as a non-Israeli) am supposed to send money to help the Israelis, Palestinians, both or neither.

Either way, what would happen if the Palestinians "got good" is a fully unexplored counterfactual. If we assume things are operating on blood feud logic, it wouldn't be surprising that if they actually managed to level the kill count and get their 100ksomething kills of Israelis, the Palestinians would consider the debt settled and be willing to negotiate earnestly. (Of course, 100k dead Israelis would likely make Israel go nuclear, with the US paying and delivering the nukes.)

I don't think the Israel-Palestine conflict can be understood without considering the facts that (1) Hamas, and the Palestinian people in aggregate, are strategically committed to genocide against the Jewish people, and (2) Hamas, with the enthusiastic support of the Palestinian people, deliberately embeds themselves into the civilian population in such a way that the cannot be brought to justice for acts of terror without high civilian casualties. If you don't believe those two things, then the "occupation" looks unjust, and the Palestinian "civilian" casualties look morally outrageous. If you do believe those things, then Israel is taking just and necessary steps to defend themselves. So everything hinges on those questions of fact.

Did you ignore the part of my post where I said that I accept those facts and think the Palestinians are morally in the right to do that? It is not just to defend yourself against justified self-defense.

And the reason there are no examples is that in the real world, civilized people do not respond to oppression with campaigns of murder of civilians on the other side.

I'd consider the Israeli retaliation to be a campaign of murder of civilians on the other side just the same (I mean, even without getting into the weeds of how much the civilians they kill when allegedly going after Hamas seem to be treated as happy accidents by them, we have concrete cases of Israeli soldiers sniping Palestinian women and children for sport).

(A) IRA terrorism is or was morally justified

Yes, in my opinion. (Also the ETA and a lot of other examples like that) I think I'm generally much more sympathetic to terrorism than the socially accepted median, and find the idea that civilians inherit no culpability for the actions that a state they elected, supported, voluntarily cheered for and in turn benefitted from to be distasteful and self-servingly promulgated by people who stand to benefit a great deal from such exculpation.

I'm slightly overwhelmed with the number of responses, but I think a lot of them bring up similar points (e.g. the "Israel right to take revenge in turn for Palestinian actions?" ones). Please look at them for detail.

Not enough effort, please be more charitable than this.

I mostly agree with what you said, except your last paragraph seems like a bit of a category error to me. I'm not particularly concerned with which outcome would be more perverse here, but it does concern me that wherever I go, the government and influential parts of local society seem to assert that Israel is in fact in the right and it is our (and by extension my) moral obligation to support them with actions and treasure. It is this chain of reasoning that I want to argue against. Even if I accept the premise that I have a duty to contribute to right moral wrongs everywhere on the planet at all (and I don't!), I am not convinced that helping Israel is directionally correct to right moral wrongs. On top of that, it is not even instrumentally beneficial for me or the countries I live in, as helping Israel makes it a more likely target of spite and retaliation by the supporters of Palestine and produces a steady stream of low-human-capital immigration from the fallout, and, well, has a cost in actions and treasure. On the other hand, if Israel were actually obliterated, its high-human-capital people would probably emigrate into one of the same countries and contribute positively to living conditions here!

the willing flight narrative has been thoroughly taken apart by israel's "new historians". here's a thorough review of the historiography: https://www.zochrot.org/publication_articles/view/51011/en?Were_they_expelled

Like the Irish journalist Erskine Childers before him, Morris found no evidence of instructions or directions by the Arab Higher Committee, or any Arab government for that matter, to the local population of Palestine to leave the country. All he could trace was instructions by the Arab Higher Committee to local commanders to secure the evacuation of women, children and old men from the areas of danger.

some other examples:

israel's secret campaign of poisoning arab wells, countenanced by david ben gurion

deir yassin massacre

benny morris, who certainly is no bleeding heart leftist: "In truth, however, the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and PoWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948, and noted that only 6 out of 392 towns and villages that he examined were abandoned due to Arab orders

Insofar as I've seen it here, the three main reasons to be pro-Israel are:

  • religiousness (religious right might not be a potent force here but there are a number of people matching that category, and they tend to be evangelical and fervently pro-Israel)
  • owning the libs (nobody cares who ADL or JIDF are here, of course, or even knows them - it's mainly that the left has traditionally been pro-Palestine for anticolonial/(post-)pro-Soviet reasons, so the enemy of my enemy thinking has quite naturally directed right-wingers to be pro-Israel
  • related to above, pro-Americanism and the idea that to be America's best pal, especially now, also requires supporting Israel.

As /u/2rafa says below the Israel supporters tend to be center-right or right-wing, even among the center-left the sort of fervent Zionism one might encounter in Democrats or Labour is basically non-existent here and the explicitly anti-semitic far-right is a minimal force.

Aside from the fact that it appeals to the doomers, why?

Liberal Democracy is basically only possible if people are some sort of creedal, Reformed Christian. You can have any creed you want, Episcopalian, Methodist, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Atheist, etc. but you have to conform to the social and theological norms of Reformed Christianity. Shariah Law and Halakah just aren't compatible with Western society and can only be tolerated when they are tiny minorities.

unless action is taken on order or request [or direction] of said foreign government or an agent thereof.

As I contextualized in my OP, the billionaires have agents attending private meetings with government heads, and in all likelihood have connections with Mossad, and it seems are specifically asking them how to conduct pro-Israel advocacy. If the heads, of if the Mossad agents, have given them a direction or a request as it relates to their advocacy efforts, then they would be violating FARA. This is regardless of their original desire. Otherwise, no one would ever have to register for FARA (“I want to help Paraguay. Now I will go to Paraguay and they will tell me exactly what to do, but it’s okay because the original impetus was my own.”). A person’s original impetus is immaterial to whether their actions are being directed by a foreign principal. At its broadest,

any person who acts as a representative or in any other capacity under the direction of a foreign principal (or [under the direction] of a person any of whose activities are directly or indirectly supervised in major part by a foreign principal),

and who directly or through any other person:

engages within the United States in political activities for or in the interests of such foreign principal;

or acts within the United States as a public relations counsel, publicit agent, information-service employee or political consultant for or in the interests of such foreign principal;

or within the United States represents the interests of such foreign principal before any agency or official of the Government of the United States

Now back to the WaPo article:

From the start of the chat, members sought guidance and information from officials in the Israeli government.

This is blatantly illegal per FARA. They are acting (1) in a capacity (2) under the direction of a foreign principle (3a) in the interest of the foreign principal (3b) and engaging in political activity.

It would appear, therefore, that using this new law to reimplement affirmative action would not be legal.

Is there no way for Democrats to make the court more favorable ? E.g. by say, packing it with wise latinas?

"Justice"/moral right is what I mostly see being invoked to convince populations of third-party countries including ones I live and pay taxes in to support Israel, transfering things of value and exposing themselves to risk. This is why I see the need to argue against it. If I am asked to sacrifice for a cause for the sake of justice, I would like to know if the cause is actually just.