domain:npr.org
I don’t know why you’re assuming that Israel advocates necessarily believe that Palestinian resistance / violence / revenge is “morally wrong”. I certainly don’t. I fully agree that the Palestinians have a ‘right to resist’ settler colonialism (which is what Israel is) to no lesser degree than the American Indians or Australian aboriginals or indigenous Hawaiians did and do.
Nevertheless, part of waging this kind of war ought to be an implicit acceptance of vae victis, of victor’s justice. The Palestinians have waged three failed wars against the Jews. If they are crushed, utterly, if they are oppressed now then that, too, is the law of the jungle. Their honor prevents them from accepting the peace that some other native peoples once did; so be it. The Palestinians are not the first people to be replaced in their corner of the Levant; they may not be the last. So it goes.
I don't think that this original wrong has been made right to the Palestinians
Has the original wrong been made right to Native Americans? Remember, “they got a lot of welfare/casino money/etc” is an unsuitable argument according to you (eg. Bill Gates’ servant), and their participation in democracy (ie the right to vote/US citizenship) is also laughably insufficient given their tiny minority status at 2% of the population means that they are effectively under permanent rule by Europeans and other settlers, and have next to no say in national politics.
The truth is that Churchill was right about settler colonialism. It is the law of the universe, it is no moral harm. The perverse thing is not population replacement, which is historically commonplace, it is the replacement of a successful, high performing population with a less successful, lower performing one. You seemingly consider this argument illegitimate; it is not. Is it wrong for Donald Trump to support Norwegians migrating to the US but oppose Somalis doing so? I don’t think so.
sun_the_second
58m ago
I'd be tempted to answer with "first_time?.png" if I were Jewish.
No_one
9m ago
He replies "she could lose some weight" or "you could lose some weight" to any picture of a woman he comes across, with the exception of actually anorexic or very thin ones where he'll say "you should gain some weight".
I'd say the only constant is that it makes women mad.
shakenvac
13m ago
the present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves.
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.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you.
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.)
If you have been driven out of your house and into a corner at gunpoint by the mafia, the mafia boss's kid stands by watching the show and mocking you, and, seeing an opening, you shoot the kid, I will find it hard to fault you for the murder
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.
I appreciate the detailed writeup. I will freely concede the following points: your analysis is probably correct, and the ICC's verdict is probably tendentious and politically motivated.
I am, I'm afraid, arguing vibes. The USA's pitch to the world over last half-century of so has been something along the lines of:
"We're here to help. Previously, empires were allowed to bully and exploit smaller countries, but we're different. We intend to put in place a world order that will allow (and require) countries to cooperate and trade with each other on equal terms. We intend to police the world if necessary, but not to rule it."
Given that, for America to exempt itself and its vassals from the international court with jurisdiction over
(a) The crime of genocide; (b) Crimes against humanity; (c) War crimes; (d) The crime of aggression.
and to explicitly threaten employees of the court is a very bad look. It makes people start to wonder why America feels that laws around genocide and war crimes are "inapplicable or inappropriate" when applied to America. It brings back memories of the invasion of Iraq. It also brings back memories of things like the unequal extradition treaty between America and the UK. It's as though Bill Gates declared that he was too important to be bound by laws against murder, or at the very least demanded the right to determine whether those laws were being correctly applied to him and his friends on a case-by-case basis.
it would be immoral to force nation-states to be governed by agreements they did not agree to
Precisely as immoral as it is to force people to be governed by laws they didn't sign.
In short, does America sincerely believe that it is too important and powerful to answer to anyone else? America's behaviour suggests that the answer is yes, and any intimations otherwise is 'who, whom' propaganda. The more America resorts to economic and diplomatic coercion, the less interested everyone else is in helping to maintain the system and America's place in it.
Having said all of that, I think that international law is an extremely flawed concept. The idea that one government can enter into an agreement that is considered binding on subsequent governments decades later seems ludicrous and anti-democratic. As with most law, it's ultimately a fudge for applying coercive power in a manner that is mostly accepted and results in minimal fuss. I wouldn't bear America any ill will for saying, "our voters are pro-Israel and we feel the need to act accordingly, regardless of international law" provided that they extended the same courtesy to everybody else.
I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better
Coleman Hughes puts the case for the Israel beautifully in this 2 minute video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHekt7WLo
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.
The objective of genocide is stated in Hamas's 19988 charter. In the early 2000's, the ruling party of Palestine was Fatah, a terrorist organization. Before the 2006 elections, Fatah renounced terrorism as a tactic, but Hamas did not. Subsequently, Hamas became more popular and they won 74 seats in Palestinian parliament, a majority, compared with Fatah's 45. Since then Hamas has controlled the schools and media in Gaza and the Palestinian population has become even more fanatical in their genocidal hatred of Israel.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself,
In the abstract, this is the case for Palestine. If you look at it in a vacuum, it makes sense, but I don't think we should look at it in a vacuum. We should compare the response of the Palestinians to the way they have been treated to the responses of other groups who have been treated similarly. We didn't see this kind of terrorism from Ukraine and Crimea when they were occupied by the Soviet Union, and we didn't see it by the Jews themselves when they were occupied by Rome. We don't see it by Armenians against Azerbaijan, we didn't see it when France and Poland were occupied by Germany; etc., etc., etc. When somebody says, "how would you feel if...", the very fact that they have to make up this hypothetical means that they cannot think of a historical example of a morally justified campaign of terror against a civilian population by an allegedly oppressed civilization. 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. In a hypothetical, you might imagine that they do, or that you would -- but they don't and you wouldn't.
If you want to argue in the direction that my historical examples above aren't comparable to the Palestinian case, then that itself demonstrates that you cannot make a moral for Hamas. If you wanted to (validly) argue that the Palestinian response is moral, you would have to either (1) assert that the Palestinians have gotten shafted in a way that no other group in history ever has, or (2) point to historical examples of morally justified campaigns of homicide against civilians, along with the use of human shields to enable it, a la Hamas. You might argue, for example, that (A) IRA terrorism is or was morally justified, and that (B) the tactics of the IRA are morally comparable to those of Hamas. Or you might argue that the French Underground in WWII was comparable to Hamas in their justification and in their tactics. Would you make one of those arguments, or any other such argument based on a historical example rather than a hypothetical or an abstraction? You have all of recorded history to choose from.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1hr ago
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
But, as I've argued before, there is no neutral definition of what constitutes an "inflammatory" claim. The claims that count as inflammatory for you depend on the particular ideological viewpoint you've adopted. So it would at least be good to specify the viewpoint from which you're judging a particular claim as inflammatory.
I personally don't think there's anything inflammatory at all about "women love a killer". Regardless of whether the claim is true or false, I don't view it as a slight against women, or a failing on their part. Plausibly it could be taken as a relatively natural corollary of a Darwinian/Hobbesian view of life.
I'm aware that my view on this particular question may be unusual, and in the framing of say, polite upper middle class Western society, most people would view this as an inflammatory claim. But if "polite upper middle class Western society" is going to be the frame of reference that we use for judging claims as inflammatory on TheMotte, shouldn't we be modding a lot more posts than we already are? Every time HBD comes up for example, a number of posters write under the assumption that HBD is true. But HBD would be considered to be an extremely inflammatory complex of claims by most people in the West today. Is no one allowed to post under the assumption that HBD is true unless they include a link to a list of HBD 101 resources laying out the supporting evidence?
Dean
32m ago
What was the diplomatic position of the United States about the ICC charging Vladimir Putin?
Legit question?
As a formal position, they've been mostly silent, with various policy-journal debates on how much to support or not. Some elements have used it as an argument to join the Rome Statute entirely, others resist.
As a practical / strategic position, the US is happy to help investigate / catalog war crimes, and then signal-boosting the ICC's findings to other ICC states to complicate Russia's relations. While the US itself isn't a member of the ICC, many of Russia's partners are, and so helping the ICC works against Russia and to the US interest even if no arrest is made.
As a legal position? That ICC has limited jurisdiction over various crimes in Ukrainian territory due to Ukraine inviting them to.
This is the ICC bulletin rather than a US statement, but the US would generally follow the point:
Ukraine is not a State Party to the Rome Statute, but it has twice exercised its prerogatives to accept the Court's jurisdiction over alleged crimes under the Rome Statute occurring on its territory, pursuant to article 12(3) of the Statute. The first declaration lodged by the Government of Ukraine accepted ICC jurisdiction with respect to alleged crimes committed on Ukrainian territory from 21 November 2013 to 22 February 2014. The second declaration extended this time period on an open-ended basis to encompass ongoing alleged crimes committed throughout the territory of Ukraine from 20 February 2014 onwards.
The general position of the US in Iraq or Afghanistan is that the US forces remained in the government after the initial invasions at the request of the legitimate and internationally recognized governments, with whom the US had a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that governed authorized activities and how to handle incidents of misconduct (including how trials would occur). The position would be that misconduct by US forces wasn't a matter of policy or purpose, but something the US would investigate and if appropriate prosecute soldiers for when identified. The US would provide data and information to support that point when asked, even as it denied the ICC had a jurisdiction to detain or try US soldiers.
The main contrasts with the Russian position is that Ukraine is an internationally recognized state who has invited the ICC in to investigate what has occurred on internationally recognized Ukrainian territory, but the Iraqi/Afghan governmets that were internationally recognized were not trying to invite the ICC against the US or its coalitions*.
*This is why most of the ICC applications in the context of Iraq were centered on the UK. Between the US, the UK, and Iraq, the UK was the only one the ICC had automatic jurisdiction over and could compel cooperation from.
Mantergeistmann
38m ago
The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves.
My understanding is that prior to the '40s, said present ruling population (or their ancestors) had themselves been violently expelled from their homes, in some cases by the present Palestinians/their ancestors, or other related groups. It feels odd to me to acknowledge the Arab/Muslim claims on the territory and ancestral lands while pretending all Jews are interlopers. Kind of like if we recognized England as "Ancestral Norman land".
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
38m ago
Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict.
Remember that there are a decent amount of people not interested in discussing any particular thing. I've been largely staying out of it, for instance, because I've already come to a conclusion on the best policy of the West (get the fuck out, at least as far as military assistance, to avoid making enemies by backing Israel and avoid getting nuked by openly backing Palestine), it doesn't seem especially likely to blow up in a way that leads to WWIII (unlike Taiwan, which I check the news on every week or so), and I'm not enough of a masochist to keep soaking my brain in the endless stream of atrocities without some actual benefit to doing so.
Dean
1hr ago
Either you believe in an international rules-based order or you don’t.
To believe in an international rules-based order, you have to believe that there are actual rules, or else it's an arbitrary vibes-based order. And while I do like my vibing, the text of the Rome Statute of the International Court is easily accessible and free online.
Not to spoil too much in advance, but the scope of the ICC has limits. There's a reason the preamble to the Rome Statute of the International Court starts with 'The States Parties to this statute' (distinguishing them from States not party to the statute), and emphasizes '
Emphasizing in this connection that nothing in this Statue shall be taken as authorizing any State Party to intervene in an armed conflict or in the internal affairs of any State.
(No, there is no definition of what 'intervene' means in this context. Which means the prohibition is as small, or large, as you want or can get away with.)
But preambles are fluff. Other limits are baked into the law and include where it may exercise its functions and powers-
Article 4 - Legal status and powers of the Court 2. The Court may exercise its functions and powers, as provided in this Statute, on the territory of any State Party and, by special agreement, on the territory of any other State.
- and preconditions on the exercise of ICC jurisdiction.
Article 12 - Preconditions to the exercise of jurisdiction
- A State which becomes a Party to this Statute thereby accepts the jurisdiction of the Court with respect to the crimes referred to in article 5.
- In the case of article 13, paragraph (a) or (c), the Court may exercise its jurisdiction if one or more of the following States are Parties to this Statute or have accepted the jurisdiction of the Court in accordance with paragraph 3: (a) The State on the territory of which the conduct in question occurred or, if the crime was committed on board a vessel or aircraft, the State of registration of that vessel or aircraft; (b) The State of which the person accused of the crime is a national.
- If the acceptance of a State which is not a Party to this Statute is required under paragraph 2, that State may, by declaration lodged with the Registrar, accept the exercise of jurisdiction by the Court with respect to the crime in question. The accepting State shall cooperate with the Court without any delay or exception in accordance with Part 9.
To wit- by the very rule creating the ICC, the ICC's jurisdiction is explicitly conditional, not universal. It is conditional on a state becoming a party to the Statute, or having accepted the jurisdiction of the Court over the matter (either in general or for the specific issue). If these preconditions are not met, the ICC as a court does not have jurisdiction.
Simply as a principle, the ICC does not have universal jurisdiction. That is a matter of international law.
Now, that's not the end of the matter as it relates to Israel, but it the start of a very significant snarl that will generally require you to presume a conclusion in order to resolve.
Claims of ICC jurisdiction over the Israeli-Hamas conflict hinge on Article 12 Para 2, subparagraph (a), 'The State on which the territory of which the conduct in question occurred.' This is the 'if it occurs on the territory of a State that is a member of the ICC, the ICC has jurisdiction' approach. The ICC position is that the State of Palestine is a member, as of 2015. This gives it the jurisdiction over the territory of it's member, the State of Palestine. What is the territory of the State of Palestine? Well, the ICC position is that it's jurisdiction territorially extends to the West Bank (which is under Israeli military occupation), Eastern Jerusalem (which is annexed by Israel), and the Gaza Strip.
Of course, this itself brings back issues going back to the jurisdiction. Setting aside the first two, the jurisdiction over the Gaza Strip is based on the claim of the ICC-acknowledged State of Palestine, which was admitted in 2015.
Except, of course, that the State of Palestine- as represented by the PLO that is the West Bank signatory- not only wasn't a recognized sovereign state in 2015 by inclusion into the United Nations (which is the primary international organization the ICC text aligns it with in terms of seeking information), it wasn't even in control of the Gaza Strip as a de facto state. The PLO was thrown out of the Gazan Strip- and thrown off buildings in the Gaza Strip- in 2007, nearly a decade before the ICC accession.
In other words, the ICC granted itself jurisdiction of territories not on the basis of the international law, but on the basis of internal decision on grounds of admitting a state not recognized by the United Nations as a sovereign state that said state had lost before joining the ICC. The international law basis of this conclusion is, well, as convincing as it needs to be if you're convinced.
Moreover, even the Article 12-Para B route of jurisdictions runs into the issue that the jurisdiction of actors/territories runs into the questions of jurisdiction of applicable crimes.
Article 5 - Crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court The jurisdiction of the Court shall be limited to the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole. The Court has jurisdiction in accordance with this Statute with respect to the following crimes: (a) The crime of genocide; (b) Crimes against humanity; (c) War crimes; (d) The crime of aggression.
This is obviously contested given the hyperbolic propaganda surrounding the conflict, but in a very short form the death tolls we're seeing versus the firepower used are not really consistent with genocidal practices in other contexts unless you stretch the term genocide to it's lesser scopes and extremes that lose moral relevance due to overuse, and the arguments on war crimes typically run into the issue that the laws of war do not actually prohibit targeting military objectives even when civilian casualties are incurred (a common vibes-based misunderstanding).
The category of crime most relevant to the ICC in the context of the Israel incursion into Gazi might be the crime of aggression, which covers all the banal evils of war-
Article 8 - Crime of aggression
- For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations.
- For the purpose of paragraph 1, “act of aggression” means the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations. Any of the following acts, regardless of a declaration of war, shall, in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974, qualify as an act of aggression: (a) The invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State, or any military occupation, however temporary, resulting from such invasion or attack, or any annexation by the use of force of the territory of another State or part thereof; (b) Bombardment by the armed forces of a State against the territory of another State or the use of any weapons by a State against the territory of another State; (c) The blockade of the ports or coasts of a State by the armed forces of another State; (d) An attack by the armed forces of a State on the land, sea or air forces, or marine and air fleets of another State; (e) The use of armed forces of one State which are within the territory of another State with the agreement of the receiving State, in contravention of the conditions provided for in the agreement or any extension of their presence in such territory beyond the termination of the agreement; (f) The action of a State in allowing its territory, which it has placed at the disposal of another State, to be used by that other State for perpetrating an act of aggression against a third State; (g) The sending by or on behalf of a State of armed bands, groups, irregulars or mercenaries, which carry out acts of armed force against another State of such gravity as to amount to the acts listed above, or its substantial involvement therein
...except that the very same Rome Statute establishing the ICC explicitly forbids that.
Article 15 - Exercise of jurisdiction over the crime of aggression 5. In respect of a State that is not a party to this Statute, the Court shall not exercise its jurisdiction over the crime of aggression when committed by that State’s nationals or on its territory.
Which, in turn, is why the lawfare opposition to Israel in the ICC has to frame issues in terms of genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes- because those are the only categories of crimes that the ICC could potentially have jurisdiction of. If one buys the jurisdiction-via-signatory state argument that extends the ICC jurisdiction from the PLO-based West Bank to the Israeli-annexed Eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
Except, of course, that the generally accepted internal status of the West Bank is that it is under Israeli military occupation- which goes back to Article 8, which defines the Crime of Aggression
Article 8 - Crime of Aggression
- For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations.
- For the purpose of paragraph 1, “act of aggression” means the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations. Any of the following acts, regardless of a declaration of war, shall, in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974, qualify as an act of aggression: (a) The invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State, or any military occupation, however temporary, resulting from such invasion or attack, or any annexation by the use of force of the territory of another State or part thereof;
...which returns, again, to the question of jurisdiction.
For the ICC Jurisdiction chain to hold coherently, Israel must not be in a crime of aggression in its military occupation of the West Bank, despite having been accused of illegally occupying Palestine for over a half century, so that there can be a sovereign state of Palestine based in the West Bank to be a signatory state of the ICC, so that said state of Palestine can have territory for the ICC to have jurisdiction over. Said territory was determined by the ICC according to itself, absent any UN-recognized territorial state, to extend to the West Bank, which the nominal State of Palestine did not hold or govern for nearly a decade prior to its accession, so that the ICC may have jurisdiction of crimes against humanity / war crimes / genocide, but not crimes of aggression, in the current conflict between two belligerents, of whom neither are signatories of the Rome Statute.
This is, shall we say, just a little tenuous.
The fact that America supports international governance when and only when it gets to be in charge makes it look cynical and prevents people cooperating with it.
And that's a Good Thing(TM). Much of international law is inapplicable or inappropriate for many parts of the international community, and it would be immoral to force nation-states to be governed by agreements they did not agree to. There's a reason most international arbitration bodies- including the ICC- have clauses that they only apply to non-members if non-members assent for specific situations.
The Americans, much like the Europeans and everyone else in the international relations sphere, are very consistent that they are only bound by international agreements they have agreed to be bound by. That agreement may be a concession, conditional, or even coerced to some degree (though not by all measures), and a lack of agreement may be condemned, but the agreement is required due to the principles of sovereignty involved.
As such, it is quite normal and accepted for states to not only advocate for other people to come in agreements and be bound by international laws they themselves wouldn't want to be a part of- see the non-European support for the European Union accession of various states, or the various environmental conferences- but also seeks exceptions or refuse to partake in other states agreements.
The premise of the rules-based order is not, and never has been, that states are subject to agreements they haven't been party to. Rather, it's been that reneging or violating agreements that one is party to offers basis for action against a state. Not-entering an agreement has always been a different, and generally preferable, state than agreeing to and then breaking international law.
How many levels of tiresomeness are you on?
On one hand I do sympathize, but after a decade of listening to how cis-straight-white-males are responsible for all of society's ills, I'm tempted to ask you to take a number, and go to the end of the queue.
NelsonRushton
42m ago
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?
2rafa
46m ago
Yes, I think so. To be all three requires a lot of genetic luck, being born beautiful likely into a wealthy family, being intelligent, having the right education, and being both confident and self-aware / humble enough to know when to pivot to the next role or to change your personality. You need to be a very lucky and socially adroit sociopath.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
51m ago
Presumably if one could have reported the experience without naming the perpetrator (or making it obvious who it was), but chose not to.
Forgotpassword
2hr ago
Personally I feel the entire anti-colonial case is entirely overblown. Independent Palestine likely equates to Lebanon 2.0, or another oil-poor Arabic mediocrity. Whilst I think it'd be better for all involved if Israel were located in Madagascar or the Northern Territory of Australia, that is not the case. They're certainly acting in a way inconsistent with modern Western ethics, but the vast majority of pro-Palestine Westerners would find living in independent Palestine to be a lot harder than living in 2024 Israel.
I also feel that if a return to a sufficient level of realpolitik and putting Western interests first is ever going to be pulled into the Overton window at this point, it's going to be through supporting Israel and hoping that the media eventually pivots away from the anti-colonialist meme. I fail to see the personal good of supporting Palestine, I fail to see how independent Palestine is a better lifestyle for practically anybody involved and I feel that this is potentially the lynchpin issue that will help to restore sanity to the world as a whole.
Still find it hilarious that people went through years of debate over whether antifa/BLM was being treated with kids' gloves as regime foot soldiers. And now the whole thing's been put to rest by a conflict between antifa and a group with even more political power behind them.
The government-backed mob gets to do whatever they want, and the people they do it to get rounded up and arrested. And I say this as someone with literally zero sympathy for the Hamas supporters it's happening to this time: analyzing how "crime" is used as an extrajudicial enforcement tool by the total liberal state is more important than arguing for a side.
I should do a book report on Schmidt's Theory of The Partisan, because nobody else has come close to describing how regime-backed mob violence works as a political force.
There's been so many examples in the past month. "Just stop oil" being escorted by police while their victims are arrested, Portland antifa burning a dozen police cars without any sign of an investigation happening (the website they used to claim responsibility is still online!), and now this.
It all reminds me of the old story from the UN human rights investigator in Yugoslavia, hearing stories about how the police would come round to confiscate guns from a town to clear the way for "unaffiliated" militias to commit massacres the next day. And of course the closely related Existential Comics vision of a "police-free" society ruled by leftist gangs..
Is this the future of ethnic and religious conflict in modern states?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
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.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5hr ago
Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict. I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better; in particular, I wonder if there are arguments for the Israeli position in the current war that don't mostly rest on one of the following:
-
An arbitrary cutoff of historical reckoning either shortly before the most recent Hamas attack, or else somewhere in the early '90s following the general Western mode of thinking about other geopolitical conflicts. Unilaterally declaring all scores settled is not a persuasive or universalizable moral principle.
-
Invocation of inherent superior qualities of Israeli Jews relative to Palestinians, be it intelligence, education or general "civilizedness". You would almost certainly either need to cut out a very contrived set of conditions to make the principle only apply to this case, or accept some hypothetical corollary you probably don't want that involves similar abuse being heaped on morally/intellectually/civilizationally inferior people that you care about or feel kinship to.
The way I see it, the moral case for Palestine is pretty clear, and unlike some seem to assume does not require you to subscribe to a lot of oppressed-are-always-right slave morality (though you do need to stop short of maximally might-makes-right master morality). The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves. I do not think that Palestinians' stupidity or backwardness or whatever are so great that they can't be afforded what we otherwise consider basic human rights to property and safety, even if the people who want to take those from them for themselves were all literal Von Neumanns.
I don't think that this original wrong has been made right to the Palestinians, and the argument that some Palestinians submitted and got to live better lives under the Israelis than they would have had in an independent Palestine does not morally convince me either. If Bill Gates steals the plots some rednecks built their houses on, builds a mansion in its place and then offers them lavish jobs as domestic servants, do the ones who don't accept forfeit their right to complain about the theft? Another counterargument seems to rest on something like statute of limitations (like, the Palestinians and Israelis alive nowadays are not the ones who got robbed and their robbers), which would be more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding, and there weren't still Palestinians who are quite directly being made to suffer at the hands of the Israeli men with guns for no other reason than that they do not accept the "become Bill Gates's domestic servant" deal. It seems pretty clear to me that there is no recourse left to the Palestinians who do not want to to take this deal that preserves their human dignity - their conquerors certainly won't hear them out themselves, and they are backed by the US machine which not only could produce a personal cruise missile for every Palestinian if it put its mind to it but also has enough intellectual and propaganda firepower that they could make even the Palestinians doubt that they are themselves humans with rights.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed. (If you have been driven out of your house and into a corner at gunpoint by the mafia, the mafia boss's kid stands by watching the show and mocking you, and, seeing an opening, you shoot the kid, I will find it hard to fault you for the murder even though the kid is technically innocent of the misfortunes that befell you and this did absolutely nothing to help your situation. As a bonus, the corrupt police (my country) is then called in to arrest you, after sharing a smoke with the mafiosi.)
Though I said that the moral case for Palestine is clear, this is emphatically not to say that I rule out the possibility of a clear moral case for Israel existing at the same time. "They're both justified to continue murdering each other" is a sad reality of a lot of tribal conflict. However, in this particular case, I actually do not even see that case, or at least what I have seen seems much weaker to me, given that Israelis still have the option to leave Israel at any time as a large part of the world would welcome them with open arms (while the anti-Palestinians like reiterating that not even other Muslim countries want to take in the Palestinians, as if that helps their case), and even though in some sense they would also then be "driven from their homes" it's not like they are usually unaware of those homes' provenance.
I hinted at this with "liberal total state", but I think that this is a new environment of omnipresent state control + supposed "liberal norms" about the use of state power.
Once upon a time a feuding clan could come and kill you and the king couldn't do much about it. Sometime later the king could send his men to kill you and nobody could do much about it.
Now we're at a point where the state has almost total power to restrain or permit violence, but in theory isn't supposed to have you murdered for opposing the state. So state violence against its victims is carried out extrajudicially by a criminal underclass that is allowed to e.g. carry guns in Chicago to do drivebys without being prosecuted. Or antifa thugs in Portland and Seattle that carry around illegal rifles in public to burn police stations. Or leftist hackers allowed to DDOS opposition websites, spam them with child porn uploads, and call in threats to the host/registrar/tier1 networks.
Or, even more hilariously, gangs of IDF-backed Jewish frat boys lol.
The state uses the criminal class as a hands-off weapon of anarcho-tyranny. It's not a subtle tool, and sometimes to their shock it bites the hand that feeds it; as Marion Barry said after being beaten by home invaders who stole his drugs, "I thought they knew I'm on their side"
This is all pretty new and unexpected as far as I can tell. Everyone predicted totalitarian control through a surveillance state and the secret police, not party NGOs raising money for violent street thugs, hacking rings, and doxxing groups.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
1hr ago
Our preference for salt is much easier to explain. Sodium is an essential mineral, and getting enough of it is important for all terrestrial animals that are not obligate carnivores.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
13hr ago
Jewish billionaires conspire to change the narrative on the protests. From WaPo. (Archive link)
A group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, according to communications obtained by The Washington Post.
Business executives including Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt held a Zoom video call on April 26 with Mayor Eric Adams (D), about a week after the mayor first sent New York police to Columbia’s campus, a log of chat messages shows. During the call, some attendees discussed making political donations to Adams, as well as how the chat group’s members could pressure Columbia’s president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police to the campus to handle protesters, according to chat messages summarizing the conversation.
Some members also offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests, the chat log shows — an offer a member of the group reported in the chat that Adams accepted
The messages describing the call with Adams were among thousands logged in a WhatsApp chat among some of the nation’s most prominent business leaders and financiers, including former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital [..] The chat was initiated by a staffer for billionaire and real estate magnate Barry Sternlicht[…] In an Oct. 12 message, one of the first sent in the group, the staffer posting on behalf of Sternlicht told the others the goal of the group was to “change the narrative”
The chat group formed shortly after the Oct. 7 attack, and its activism has stretched beyond New York, touching the highest levels of the Israeli government, the U.S. business world and elite universities. Titled “Israel Current Events,” the chat eventually expanded to about 100 members, the chat log shows. More than a dozen members of the group appear on Forbes’s annual list of billionaires; others work in real estate, finance and communications
“He’s open to any ideas we have,” chat member Sitt, founder of retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities, wrote April 27, the day after the group’s Zoom call with Adams. “As you saw he’s ok if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.”
The mayor’s office did not address it directly, instead sharing a statement from deputy mayor Fabien Levy noting that […] “The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print.”
One member asked if the group could do anything to pressure Columbia trustees to cooperate with the mayor. In reply, former congressman Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), CEO of the American Jewish Committee, shared a PDF of a letter his organization had sent that day to Columbia President Minouche Shafik calling on her to “shut these protests down.”
Usually I wouldn’t post so much from the body of an article, but there’s a lot of information to unpack here. It appears that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations, as well as the highest levels of media and academia. This comes after Mitt Romney admitted the tik tok ban was influenced by the extent of pro-Palestine content. IMO this is going to be used in American discourse about Jewish power for many years to come. You have Jewish billionaires across industries banding together to manipulate the narrative, influence politicians, and “shut it down” — literally a trope of Jewish power. The influence here is, frankly, incredible: a dozen billionaires alone, conspiring with journalists and academics and advocacy group leaders, talking about using black celebrities to push their narrative and applying “leverage” to university presidents. As Cenk Uygur tweeted (no friend of the alt right), “You can't complain about the trope, if you do the trope”.
I kind of wonder if some of this is even illegal. Not that I am naive enough to believe a charge would occur if it were. They are sitting down in briefings with the Israeli government and discussing how to best push their influence machine. Isn’t this lobbying on behalf of a foreign power?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
I'm "Pro-Palestine" in the sense that I find the most defensible solution to the conflict would be two states on 1949 borders, PA in charge of the whole State of Palestine (undemocratically if necessarily), right to return to those who actually have been expelled but not to descendants, resettlement with compensation to descendants in their current countries of habitation, and international security guarantees to the two countries in a suitable way. Furthermore, I find that Israel and its policy of settlement are chiefly responsible for this not being achieved and the onus would be on Israel to take most of the steps to actualize this.
I do not base this on any moral claims on either party but simply on my understanding of what would be the most consistent solution in lieu of the international law; clearly no matter what historical injustices were perpetrated to establish Israel, its existence is fait accompli at this point, and the forceful ending of a generally internationally recognized state would have drastic international consequences. At the same time, the one question I've never seen Israel defenders answer in a proper way is; considering that Israel has in fact never claimed that West Bank and Gaza belong to it, who do they belong to? Israel still, in some weird vague way? Then why isn't it claiming them, or offering the inhabitants citizenship? Egypt and Jordan?
But those countries recognize them as a part of the State of Palestine. To some "Hamastan", in case of Gaza? Hamas is not claiming independence for Gaza. Are they completely out of jurisdiction by any state? This does not apply to any other part of the Earth apart from Antarctica, covered by an international treaty, and has not itself been defined by a treaty, so clearly this claim is just an attempt to create a new international status to some territory for the specific purpose of benefitting Israel.
The only answer that seems consistent would be that the territories are already a part of the State of Palestine, the Western countries are hypocritical in not recognizing it, and the only task would be making this situation into an internationally accepted reality. At the same time, it seems unlikely that this would happen strictly in this form, but one has to have some starting point to try and figure it all out.
Big media outlets have low public trust, so they shouldn’t be used as a litmus test for whether a story is true or important. And there are a lot of legal things which nevertheless demand our attention. IMO notable takeaways from this are —
The public narrative about an important foreign policy issue is molded by ethnic identitarian billionaires who have maximal “skin in the game”, or motive to be biased. “Jewish” is an implementation detail here, the crux of the problem is that a group of hyper-biased billionaires are changing the narrative on a highly sensitive issue which demands impartial objectivity. This influence is not counterbalanced by another force because Palestinians simply aren’t as numerous, wealthy, powerful, or tribal in America. Given that their influence is secretive, we can’t know whether a mayor or police chief is doing something because it is right or because of influence. We similarly can’t know whether a big media outlet is biased or not. IMO this means that the American public must be ultra-careful about scrutinizing information about both Israel and the protests. As another user mentioned ITT, the story of former IDF soldiers(?) clobbered the skulls of students with planks got less coverage than it would were a group of a former Iranian soldiers clobbering Jewish students. And that the police turned a blind eye on this makes one wonder whether it was a Jewish billionaire’s influence behind the scenes that encouraged it through proxies (“I will fund your campaign / give your daughter an internship / withdraw my donation / …”). That is unevidenced, but that doesn’t mean it is improbable. All we know is what they are doing in a semi-private group chat, so what they do behind the scenes could be less wholesome.
There is potentially something illegal occurring, because these activists are being briefed by the Israeli government officially, and likely by Mossad operatives unofficially.
Although the law states that protests need the proper certificates, Moral Law unequivocally states that all laws must be impartially applied. Moral law states that once you have biasedly applied a law, there no longer is a law anymore, just tyranny with a side of lying. I think that the norm during BLM was that protests on campuses did not need all the proper certificates. I would rather not have authorities selectively deciding “who gets to protest the most” based on secretive political interests by tribalistic billionaires.
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