How easy is it to be pro-Israel and anti-Netanyahu?
Hamas may need to go, but removing it will require significant ground operations. That's almost certain to mean significant Israeli casualties. Is Israel prepared for thousands of military casualties? Israel could instead just flatten Gaza, but then all the surviving Gazans would be Israel's to deal with.
I'm no general, but I'm skeptical Israel could BOTH destroy Hamas AND keep Gazan civilian casualties under 100K.
I know I am supposed to have empathy for the residents of Gaza. I know that.
However, I also know that these are the same people who in 2006 voted Hamas into power in Gaza. I get it--Fatah and the Palestinian Authority were massively corrupt. I get it. I also know what was in the Hamas Charter (as did a fair portion of the residents of Gaza who were voting) in its 1988 version (it was revised in 2017) that they campaigned upon, and more than a few Gazans knew as well. Most of these idiot leftists have zero clue about the contents. From my point of view, a good chunk of Gazans *knew* exactly what they were getting with a vote for Hamas. The levels of anti-semitism rival Mein Kampf.
From a certain perspective, the people of Gaza set this into motion in 2006. When you vote for vile and the vileness ultimately attacks and destroys *you*, it is very difficult to have empathy for you. The stove was hot, you knew it was hot, and touched it anyway. It's tough to care about what happens to you after that.
I know that makes me a bad person...but it is difficult to be charitable when you see a soldier lifting the corpse of a dead infant on your television screen.
The question is how do you get rid of Hamas? Hamas isn't a set of people, to a larger degree it's an ideology. It's a group of people who are committed to the destruction of Israel, who think that Jews do not have the right to exist.
Sure, there's leadership. But I doubt they're still dumb enough to be on the Strip. As usual, they'll let civilians and their lieutenants take the hit.
Consider demographics in particular. There are 2.1 million residents of the Gaza Strip. HALF are under the age of 15 years-old.
So far more than 6,000 bombs have been dropped in the Israeli counter-attack, there are indications that white phosphorous is being used, and so far 1,537 Palestinians have been killed тАУ including 500 children and 276 women. Given the demographics, I suspect the number of fatalities of minors (meaning someone under the age of 18) are being undercounted.
Also, all water has been cut off by Israel, as well as electricity and fuel necessary to power generators in hospitals. When former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett was asked by a British journalist yesterday what was going to happen to Palestinian babies in incubators, he replied, "Are you seriously asking me about Palestinian civilians? What is wrong with you? We're fighting Nazis."
My fear is that if the Israeli counter-attack is massively disproportionate in terms of the impact on civilians, that it will turn into a recruitment tool for Hamas. So if they end up taking out 15 civilians (assume each of these has 4 family members who care deeply for them) in order to kill a single Hamas terrorist, sure they've killed 1 terrorist, but in the process they've created a pool of 60 aggrieved people that are targets for recruitment for Hamas (or a similar terrorist organization).
This isn't a theoretical scenario. The exact same thing happened with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The international coalition could never eliminate the Taliban, because every stray drone bomb that ended up hitting a wedding created a dozen new recruits.
It is both in the best security interests of Israel and in the safety interests of Palestinian civilians, for the response to be proportionate.
"The question is how do you get rid of Hamas? Hamas isn't a set of people, to a larger degree it's an ideology. It's a group of people who are committed to the destruction of Israel, who thinks that Jews do not have the right to exist."
The same way we got Sunnis in Iraq to abandon Al Qaeda and end the Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq in '08: by their own internal decision-making.
The only people who can truly get rid of Hamas are the Palestinians themselves, because they know where Hamas sleeps at night and which families/tribes they belong to. If Palestinian men can fight an insurgency against a better-armed IDF, they can fight an easier insurgency against Hamas. All it takes is *enough*--not all--of Palestinian men to realize that Hamas isn't their friend and indeed is holding their children back from having a better future via their refusal to negotiate with Israel on a future 2-state solution and their refusal to reject the tenants of their platform (that all Jews must die and that Israel isn't allowed to exist). As long as Palestinian men keep licking Hamas' boots instead of killing them, there will be no peace. It's up to the Palestinian men to reject and kill off Hamas. Until they do, Hamas will remain in power and keep them in the violence trap of martyrdom culture and zero tolerance for Jews.
The rest of your point about military over-reactions impeding counter-insurgency goals is a valid one, and I witnessed it first hand on the ground in Iraq. Killing civilians does in fact harden a local populace against the occupier. That conflict only settled down (until 2013 with ISIS coming across the border from the Syrian civil war) because the Sunnis rejected their governing militants in the midst of a Sunni-Shia civil war on top of an insurgency against a foreign occupying military. The men of Afghanistan did not reject the Taliban via violence the way Iraqi Shia and eventually Iraqi Sunnis did with AQI. Until Palestinians are willing to fight their own militant overlords, this conflict never goes away.
Damn, that's a good question. Took me a lot of thinking, research, and analysis to come up with this answer which I'm sure many could validly critique.
I'll start with your last suggestion 1st. I mean every single Jewish person who was born in Europe and who survived the Holocaust didn't permanently lose their citizenship (meaning sure, Nazi occupiers did not treat them as citizens and revoked all their rights, but the second the Nazis were defeated, it's not like Jews had to re-apply for citizenship, it was assumed).
Prior to the war there was a vibrant community of Jewish folks all over Europe who were full citizens. After the war, they all had the right to return to their homes in Europe, and even had a right to all of their homes and pilfered property (whether they were able to ACTUALLY be fully compensated is another matter). But as you'd imagine, after your fellow citizens murdered MILLIONS of your relatives & fellow Jews with systematic cruelty and brutality, AND with pretty substantial complicity by civilian Europeans, you'd imagine that a significant portion of the Jewish population had absolutely no desire to return to Europe. I sure as hell wouldn't have gone back. I actually find it surprising that any Jews returned to Germany voluntarily in particular.
Accordingly, the establishment of a state where any Jewish person was entitled to emigrate to after WWII was a practical necessity. It was either that or forcing a bunch of Jewish people who were rightly terrified about returning to Europe to go back, which would have obviously been horrendously cruel.
Even without knowing what I know now about the history that would transpire, the British/UN approach of just designating an area in what is now modern day Israel as the new Jewish state, notwithstanding that there were people from all faiths already living in that land, had about as much sensitivity and common sense as all the other idiotic things that colonialists did after WWI and WWII (they essentially drew arbitrary borders all over the place based on superficial criteria (e.g. they way they drew the borders for an independent India and Pakistan).
So yes, finding a proper parcel of land somewhere like South America that had good fertile land, where the local government and its residents were voluntarily willing to sell the land for proper compensation would have been the ideal solution.
But who are we kidding? After WWII, Western nations would have negotiated with a totally undemocratic government in South America to acquire the land, and would just have just screwed over the residents in the process (which would likely set off its own cycle of violence). But, ASSUMING that the purchase had been properly done, that would have been the best way to avoid this cycle of misery and bloodshed for the last 70 years.
However, if we want to be honest about how Zionists managed to legally acquire land in what currently forms part of Israel, it wasn't exactly voluntary on the part of the colonizers.
The Zionist movement is historically relatively recent (Jewish people have not been claiming exclusive rights over certain territory in the "Holy Land" for 2000+ years). Zionism really only took off between 1882 and 1903, when approximately 35,000 Jews moved to Palestine. At the time, the area was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.
After WWI, the British were given control over the area after the Ottoman Empire was defeated, by the League of Nations in 1922. The British were brazenly anti-Semitic in ruling the area leading to justified resentment of the Brits by the Jewish population.
Then during WWII a ton of pro-Zionist Jews illegally settled in the area (I say "illegally" mostly because the Brits were bastards about allowing Jews to escape Europe during this time period, imposing quotas, taxes, etc. as did the U.S. and Canada). So in 1946, Zionist militias started engaging in guerilla warfare and terrorism against the British authorities to gain independence.
By 1947 the Brits gave up and just allowed the UN to determine a partition agreement creating a Jewish state.
Accordingly, by the time that an independent state of Israel was legally established by the UN, it was already a fait accomplis. I think there were something like 800K Jews already living there, fighting to stay there.
So I seriously doubt the Jewish settlers would have accepted a random parcel of land in South America after how hard they fought to gain independence from Britain in the preceding years, in areas that are now part of Israel.
All of which to say that with all the hindsight in the world, as of 1947, it was pretty much inevitable that a Jewish state would be established in the middle-east.
I mean short of travelling back in time to 1882 and persuading Zionists to pick another random chunk of land, this was inevitable.
But of course, back in 1882 there was absolutely no reason why the international community would come together and purchase a random parcel of land in South America to establish a Jewish state. Only the Holocaust created that impetus, at which point it was waaaaay too late to establish a Jewish state elsewhere.
I should end by noting however, that I'm not comfortable with the idea of any country being a "preferential democracy" where members of a particular religion get preferential treatment in perpetuity. There should have been a reasonable time-limit for Jewish refugees after WWII to get preferential treatment in resettlement in whatever parcel of land was given to them.
I find it fundamentally offensive that to this day, ANYONE of the Jewish faith, with zero connection to the land for thousands of years, can automatically get Israeli citizenship, while Palestinian refugees who fled the area in the war of 1948 or were expelled from the area by Zionist militias have no right to go back to physical homes in what is now Israel, that their families held for generations (Egypt has stated that they do not want to accept a mass exodus of Palestinian refugees into Egypt, in part because Israel has not, and will not, guarantee their right to return after the counter-offensive is completed, a concern that is 100% legitimate given the history post-1948. And obviously because no country in the world has the means to absorb 2.3 million refugees overnight).
Don't get me wrong, I know why Israel has established a preferential democracy: the Palestinian-Muslim birthrate far exceeds that of the Israeli Jewish birthrate, so if Palestinians were granted the right to return with full citizenship, they would democratically end preferential treatment for Jews, which would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
As has been stated by people much smarter than me: "You can be a religious state, or you can be a democracy. You can't be both."
Yes, that is very true - but not very useful in this situation. What actions does this collection of attitudes dicate? Hamas needs to go - but how to convert this from a wish into a reality without horrible consequences to civilians? I think it is hard.
You get the Palestinian people to turn on Hamas the way Iraqi Sunnis turned on AQI in late '07/early '08. Hamas exists as the governing body in Gaza because 1) a whole lot of Palestinians support them--some out of fear, and 2) nobody is challenging Hamas violently. If the Palestinian people started killing Hamas members and challenging their rule, well hey, now there's a whole world of possibilities for peace. All it takes is enough Palestinian men doing the same kind of insurgency they do against the IDF to Hamas instead. Until that happens, Hamas stays in charge and peace becomes impossible.
Pretty much. It is largely an irreconcilable position to be pro-peace and pro-Hamas. Hamas has no interest in peace or regard for the well being of the people of Gaza, and never will. This has frankly been evident for years, and the threads of anti-Semitism that have moved some of our own far left into adopting HamasтАЩ rhetoric framing Israel as a colonial state in order to equate its existence with old grievances that modern multiculturalism is too ready to adopt as its own are slick and disturbing.
This is not a bash on multiculturalism -- it is a necessary viewpoint on modern life in the US. However, not all struggles are the same, and the Jewish people in Israel are far more indigenous than the descendants of Arab and Turkish conquerors who now call themselves Palestinians. The times and peoples will change in many ways over centuries of population shifts, though, and today there will be no single, homogenous state of either sort without ethnic cleansing (which IтАЩm old enough to remember when we all agreed this was a bad thing to do).
In short, we can get rid of Hamas, but the core problem is that there are two peoples who both very, very badly want the old holy sites and are not terribly interested in sharing. The Israelis are usually more tolerant than the Palestinians about this, but their patience has limits when they see no serious partners for peace.
I don't completely disagree with your point, but I would like to shout out to Palestinians who engage with and are a part of the government of Israel. It's not that Palestinians don't want to share. Like here, the problem is fanatics who want to kill anyone willing to share.
Agree with all of what you said *except* for the part about Jewish people being more indigenous to the region than the Palestinians. If you look at the ratio of Arabs to Jews living in Palestine when the Balfour Declaration was announced in 1917, it was something like 5.5:1 Arab-to-Jew. Ashkenazi Jews from Europe began immigrating en masse to Palestine under the British Mandate from 1917-1939, gradually bringing that ratio closer to equilibrium. So many Ashkenazi Jews from Europe were immigrating--particularly during the 1930's for obvious reasons--that the British announced the White Paper Act of 1939 that put quota caps on immigration numbers for Ashkenazi Jews coming into Palestine from Europe. When this act was announced in 1939, the Haganah--the IDF's forerunner--began conducting terrorist attacks against the British in opposition to the White Paper Act from 1939-1948. Then the British vacated their mandate in 1948 and announced the creation of an additional country (Israel), and the rest is the history we know about. Make no mistake, the Arabs owned Palestine well before Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants out-migrated the birth rate of the domestic Arab populace.
Just think about how pissed off about "open borders" MAGA is and then think about how insane they'd go if Central and South Americans were coming here in such large numbers that they start eclipsing the "native" white people in a matter of 30 years and that's kind of what the Palestinians were going nuts over from 1917-1948. The rest is history.
Yes and no. The Ashkenazi Jews did indeed mostly come over the last century in order to flee Russian and German pogroms, and youтАЩre not going to believe this, but those folks were someone done with the idea of other people telling them they didnтАЩt deserve a place of their own. However, there was a pre-existing Jewish population that has been in the general area of modern day Israel since they first fled the Pharaoh. Conversely, the Arab descendants came with the conquests of the Turks around the same time as the Frankish military incursions that some westerners romanticize as тАЬthe CrusadesтАЭ that rose up as the Turks started preventing European pilgrims from reaching the holy land and, to a large degree, had the main effect of destroying the remnants of the old eastern Roman Empire that were centered around what is now Istanbul. Nonetheless, there was basically zero Turkish settlement of modern Israel/Palestine that wasnтАЩt predicated upon having the most swords they could agree to point in the same direction.
However, after World War II, the Jewish sense of humor for not having a state to call their own pretty much flatlined. Since theyтАЩd already started migrating to what is now Israel in greater numbers, they decided it was time to return there. The descendants of the Arabs and Turks, having had the run of the place for most of the previous millennium, were not particularly interested in ceding supremacy of the place, but as you may imagine, the Jews were pretty much done with writing their history on othersтАЩ terms. After the wars that immediately followed, both Israel and their neighbors expelled millions of Jews and Muslims, which each settled in the othersтАЩ territory. The vast majority of modern Israelis are as much the descendants of recent refugees as the Palestinians who havenтАЩt resettled in Egypt, Lebanon, or Jordan. Israel has just been more sympathetic to bettering the lives of fleeing Jews than their neighbors have been to the Palestinians.
Either way, the historical and cultural ties of Jews to that area go back several millennia; the PalestiniansтАЩ only go back one.
The Mexicans have a longer history of living in CA, NM, AZ, and TX than Americans do. Should they get to call dibs on claiming it back in the name of their historical occupancy? How about the Native American claims to the whole county minus Hawaii and Alaska? How about China's historical claims to the 9-dashed-line in the South and East China Seas? Canvassing similar claims of historical rights starts to give one a sense that they don't mean shit past a certain expiration date--and in China's case actually gives off a lot of militant imperialism vibes.
It's not that you don't have a point, but your analogy breaks down for this reason: since taking over formerly Mexican territories, Americans have created tons of very costly/profitable/useful/culturally significant things in these states, especially CA and TX: the greatest movie studio on earth, an iconic theme park, multiple powerhouse biomedical research centers, a NASA space center, etc. etc. etc. not to mention an absolute butt-ton of housing and infrastructure such as highways, ports, solar and wind farms, etc.
If America were to hand that over to Mexico now, it would be giving up God only knows how many billions of dollars, and it would be only fair for Mexico to reimburse America in some way. (Of course it won't happen, this is purely hypothetical).
In contrast, when the state of Israel was created, what did the Israelis take from the Palestinians by way of preexisting infrastructure/powerhouse industrial centers? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing it wasn't much, was it?
Major caveat: of course, both Jews and Muslims consider Jerusalem their Holy City, so Jews taking over Jerusalem would be horrible in devout Muslims' eyes. The answer here is to have some kind of joint oversight of Temple Mount by Jews and Muslims, and to divide Jerusalem between Israel and the Palestinian state/West Bank.
The reason that CA and TX got so profitable is because they were resource rich to begin with (oil/gas in TX, agriculture in CA), and large amounts of water were diverted to CA in the case of its agriculture (to say nothing of its own rare mineral wealth). To my knowledge, oil wasn't a huge deal in the 1840's when we took the American SW from Mexico as we were still transitioning from sailing ships to steam-powered ones fueled by coal. Oil became really important around the time WWII was being fought (a good look at this energy transition can be found here: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=10), and so Texas' natural resource wealth didn't really come into the picture until a good 100 years after it was taken.
Israel took water aquifers from Palestine via the West Bank. In order to make agriculture work in that arid part of the world, you need fresh water sourcing, which is the reason why Israel invests so much in desalinization plants for fresh water production. The Jordan River aquifers in the West Bank are one of the main reasons Israel doesn't want to cede those territories to a future Palestinian state. I guess my point here overall is that industry isn't what's in question, material resources are, and the prevalence of industry often relies on the presence of those resources to begin with. Would Texas be Texas if it weren't for its oil/gas wealth?
OK, you make a very good point. But in a counterfactual world in which America gave CA and TX back to Mexico in the early 20th century, or never conquered them in the first place, would we have Hollywood, the Texas Medical Center, and Disneyland? I'm guessing not. Natural resources matter, but so do institutions and governments. (Would a hypothetical Mexico that had never lost CA and TX be wealthier than today's actual Mexico? Most likely. Would it also have better institutions? Who knows?)
Re: sharing aquifers and water rights in Palestine/Israel, that is a logistical, bread-and-butter question that is very important and also downstream of "can Palestinians agree to let Israel exist without repeatedly killing Israelis y/n?"
If Palestinians settled down to peaceful two-state coexistence with Israel, I'd be 100% in favor of wealthy nations donating $$$ for building a giant desalination plant in Gaza, heck, I'd be happy to donate some of my own money.
To be fair, we might be better off as a country without Hollywood and Disneyland (less decadence, distraction, and complacency as a peoples). The Texas Medical Center might not even exist had oil and gas not become relevant, because Texas wouldn't be rich enough to stand it up without that mineral wealth.
I imagine everyone would be happy to build giant desal plants as an aided compromise in getting to a 2-state solution. The problem is that Israel doesn't want to give up those lands and Hamas would rather fight Israel than govern a country of its own (see the Taliban's recent governing headaches after finally catching the car and getting the US to leave). So even if the world offered, Israel might not take it and Hamas definitely wouldn't. This conflict only ever ends when the Palestinians abandon/kill off Hamas and when Israel decides that it's willing to give up the land it's currently letting its own settlers inhabit.
People know more about the lives of Hollywood celebrities and worship their wealth while allowing the rise of a billionaire class and knowing fuck all about foreign policy or economics, but sure, Hollywood is a national blessing lol (I may or may not be jaded about American culture haha)
Oh, I donтАЩt disagree with that at all. We could make a similar case for the Germans who were pushed out of modern Poland into their current borders. However, the Germans themselves (as well as most of the peoples you describe) have generally chosen to consider these settled matters, because they know that any future reopening of the matter will not improve said settlement.
The Palestinians, for whatever reason, have not chosen to do so. The religious and ethnic elements of it are a thing, but thatтАЩs been the case for population shifts for centuries. Whenever I see them speaking of the тАЬNakba,тАЭ I can only just kind of groan and say тАЬyou lost, get over it.тАЭ Some time in the next decade or two, the last people with any real memory of that time will be gone; weтАЩre already at a place where pretty much no one who lived there as an adult in a different time is left. Their children can figure out a different way... if they want to.
Should Ukrainians simply "get over it" and accept that they've lost Crimea and the Donbas? It's been almost a decade since they've lost it. It's a tricky thing deciding when the terms of resistance should logically expire.
Ideally, no, but youтАЩre also not 100% wrong in the implication. The Ukrainians may realistically come to a conclusion that they canтАЩt actually take Crimea and Donbas back by force without overt NATO involvement. Russia, for all their saber rattling, is meticulously seeking to avoid having any of their munitions even accidentally crossing NATO borders, and NATO is similarly avoiding anyone who answers to a western capitol fire a shot inside Ukraine, for the same reason: that turns this into World War III very quickly, and the spectre of human civilization ending in a half hour time span makes that Something No One Wants.
So our calculus/balance is, give Ukraine enough to make Russia want to get out, without doing so much that this escalates in that fashion. Obviously weтАЩre in a place where we think that trend line will be in UkraineтАЩs favor unless Trump wins the election and pulls the rug out from under them. Russia, in turn, is assuming we wonтАЩt have the patience to do so.
That said... if weтАЩre wrong, and Ukraine canтАЩt do this before they run out of disposable bodies? Yes, theyтАЩre functionally going to have to make some other deal where they let Russia keep this stuff, but Russia is also forced to accept that whatтАЩs left is going straight into NATO, so there will be no further тАЬborder edit warsтАЭ going forward.
I guess that whole international "rules based order" is a lot more fickle than we're willing to admit (or selectively enforce for that matter). Taiwan better watch its fucking back lol.
I did write and then delete a sub paragraph in there where I observed that there is a debate to be had about whether nuclear weapons have improved the world by preventing major powers from directly fighting, or made it worse by enabling bad actors with nukes to get away with whatever they want because the consequences of stopping them are always worse than letting them.
Two thought experiments on that: 1. What happens in Ukraine if nukes didnтАЩt exist? The likely answer IMO is тАЬweтАЩre probably already in World War III to get Russia out.тАЭ 2. What if Hitler (and most of the major former Allies) had had nukes in 1938, or if heтАЩd waited a decade to make his move until he did? The likely answer is, he probably doesnтАЩt ever invade France and the USSR, but France and Britain probably donтАЩt directly declare war to keep him away from the Czechs and the Poles, either. OR the central European countries along with Belgium and Holland put themselves under a French and British nuclear umbrella much like NATO today, and Hitler wouldve cynically picked on everyone who wasnтАЩt, much as Putin is doing today. Is that a better world than our having consigned the Nazis to the ashbins of history when they went too far? That is... highly questionable.
If nukes keep the peace then we shouldn't be worried about nuclear proliferation, we should be encouraging it. In my opinion, the inverse is the reality: the presence of nukes prevents potential world war at the expense of enabling genocide and atrocity. We didn't go into N Korea because they have nukes. We went into Iraq because they didn't. Nukes often enable countries to do awful shit without consequences because anyone who would think to stop them is too worried about nuclear retaliation--which is why we fucked up Saddam when he went into Kuwait in '91 but we didn't lay a finger on Putin when he went into Ukraine in '22. If Hitler had nukes when he launched the Blitzkreig in '40, would the US have invaded Europe in '44?
Welll.... Crimea is a bit of a special case, because, afaik, it used to be part of Russia until Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine (when Ukraine was part of the USSR, of course).
That said, Russia is freaking HUGE and yet they're still trying to grab more land for themselves, because Putin is a bloodthirsty scumbag. Israel is a TINY sliver of land that is literally the only homeland of the Jewish people. Everywhere else that Jews live, they live surrounded by a Gentile majority, with a very strong cultural memory of "yes, things are cool now, but the majority could turn on us (see: 1000 years of pogroms, expulsions, witch hunts, topped off with the f**king Holocaust)." To paraphrase something Steven Pinker wrote, given the history of the Jewish people, their tenacity in holding onto their land can hardly be held against them.
Crimea is important because it's the only warm water port that Russia currently owns (it leases some out of Syria, which is why that civil war was so important to them). Without a warm water port, they can't import/export year round in an efficient manner (they have to use ice breakers in the north several months a year to inefficiently make up the difference, and even then can't power project their military into the med or atlantic nearly as easily).
Satanists and gypsies don't have their own country, shall we start carving off parts of other people's territory to accommodate them and give them a country of their own? Where's the Theodore Hertzel of the Uighurs or Sufi Islamists at? They don't have a country of their own either. Even the African slaves we brought to the US stuck around after the civil war despite the pogroms they endured. They didn't just carve off a chunk of Liberia for themselves and "go back to Africa" as was often suggested back then--including from Lincoln at one point if I recall correctly.
It's not that I'm against Israel holding onto land, it's that I'm against Israel holding onto its war conquests while denying statehood for some other groups of peoples. Why do the Jews deserve self-determination and statehood while the Palestinians don't? (I ask this as an American Jew btw)
The Palestinians themselves are largely choosing not to. When Israel was formed, they rejected the partition in hopes of their Arab neighbors destroying Israel and just getting it all anyway. That... didnтАЩt work out for them.
And even today, even the most peaceful Palestinian leaders still annually commemorate IsraelтАЩs founding as a disaster, and will not accept any peace terms that do not include a тАЬright of return.тАЭ Whereas Hamas overtly calls for IsraelтАЩs destruction, even Fatah still demands that all descendants of 1948 refugees be permitted to return to Israel, which would still end Israel as a Jewish state even in the unlikely event that it did not involve actual ethnic cleansing.
Not surprisingly, Israel will never peacefully allow this. But the Palestinians are, in effect, unwilling to accept just the occupied territories. And so, they are stateless.
I never said Palestinians don't deserve statehood. I would be happy with a two-state solution, a Palestinian state and Israel, side by side, both peaceful and prosperous and, perhaps not friendly toward each other, but at least recognizing each other's right to exist. But I can't want it more than they do.
"But I can't want it more than they do." Exactly. Until Palestinians reject Hamas, they will never be in a position to "want it." The same could be said of Israeli citizens voting in politicians who refuse to end West Bank settlements. Israel should be preserving the West Bank as a bargaining chip for Palestinian statehood should the Palestinians ever come to a place where they're willing to get rid of Hamas. But neither side is doing what it needs to do, so this never really ends until they do.
ItтАЩs been illuminating watching the sorting into the extreme camps on this. Because the position you described is where I am but a solution to the conflict when you are in that position seems impossible to achieve. ItтАЩs almost like if you are in one of the extreme camps, as detestable as your solution might be, at least you can articulate it.
That is because there IS no solution to the conflict in the center.
One of the weaknesses of the center and of being reasonable and rational (at least in comparison to the extremes) is that it takes a lot of work to do things. It takes work to develop and implement solutions. It takes a lot of diplomacy and cajoling.
It is flat out hard. It only looks easy from a distance. What makes it hard is overcoming the negative aspects of human nature and groupthink.
And an extremist can blow ALL of that up in a second with a bomb or well placed bullet or sometimes just with some stupid words.
The current House fiasco is a pointed exemplar of this whole mechanic, in a less openly violent (for now) setting.
The extremist solutions aren't solutions, either--but they can pass for one in a very dim light amidst the anger and angst and fear and hatred of the situation. These "solutions" appeal to the inner animal.
This shit has been going on for three-quarters of a century or so. It has become a self-renewing and sustaining cycle. It has a life of its own, despite the best intentions of many and because of the worst intentions of a few.
But that is all it often takes, the worst intentions of a few.
ItтАЩs been going on a lot longer than that. And until humanity stops killing itself over which Bronze Age book and which imaginary sky daddy is real, it will continue.
Unfortunately, obviously, the MAGAs in our midst seem to have that one twisted; they seem to think theyтАЩre heroic and powerful by destroying things. ThatтАЩs the danger of small minded people who feel powerless; they feel powerless because someone (eg Trump) is telling them that.
This isnтАЩt just true for Israel, itтАЩs true for every difficult problem, such a global warming, immigration, and the huge gap in wealth and power all around the world. We can see from the current Republican Party that following extremists, especially foolish and incompetent ones, leads to chaos and total dysfunction. Trump and Netanyahu are both frauds and narcissists who never had the ability to deliver on their promises. Netanyahu promised peace and security, but delivered weakness. I still donтАЩt know what Trump promised, except to make himself king. ThatтАЩs why the Republicans canтАЩt decide on anything. They canтАЩt agree about what they want to accomplish. They each have a crazy pet peeve: ban books, delete history, oppose gay people, fight for fetuses, destroy the armed forces, cut social security, take money from the poor and give to the rich. They have some idea that the vast majority of Americans are against all of those things so they respond by blowing up the government.
The more horrible your situation is (and the more powerless you see yourself as being able to change it) the more likely you are to divert (or be diverted) into cultural issues that you feel strongly about that you believe yo CAN change.
And the people currently benefitting n the power structure are glad to facilitate that as long as it doesn't look like it will hurt them.
Also, it is far easier for any given тАЬweтАЭ to say what тАЬweтАЭ are against than what тАЬweтАЭwant, because it only makes sense to be against things as they are (or can be parodied that way). It is easy and profitable to specify grievances, and it requires no responsibility for imagining or articulating what тАЬweтАЭ would do differently (see: Obamacare). It is impossible to govern if government itself is тАЬthe problemтАЭ underlying every grievance.
Powerless people are easily manipulated. In the case of Trump and his cult, he had to carefully nurture their feelings of powerlessness, because in reality their lives are pretty fine, relatively speaking.
Rush Limbaugh and Faux News working on behalf of Republican billionaires had that ball rolling decades ago. They stimulated resentments against the "others" and the "elites" so they could hoodwink citizens to vote against their own economic interests. Trump was the first to realize that their resentments could be turned against the very people who had instigated and nurtured them in the 1st place.
"It is flat out hard. It only looks easy from a distance. What makes it hard is overcoming the negative aspects of human nature and groupthink."
This implies the center isn't the preferred haven for groupthink and complacency. In the instance of 10/7 the center seems to actually be energized to provide a solution for once while the right and left are throwing bombs. More often in recent times that is not the case. If the Republicans are the party of "no" then the center is the party of "can't" or at least "I can't be bothered."
While part of me thinks it is great the center is leading the charge because a long term and sustainable push to improve the situation might materialize for once, another part of me is extremely bitter that they can't be bothered on anything else. Does it literally take decapitating infants on livestreams to move the needle? Then the final, hopeless part of me remembers that it is still recent and the bill hasn't come due yet. We'll see how much appetite this holier than thou center has to make this happen come election day next year or even when hashing out the budget next month (if there is even a functioning Congress in place to do it).
I canтАЩt accept that the extreme anti-Israel contingent, complete with hang gliders on a poster, is the voice of the anything to do with тАЬthe leftтАЭ. I think itтАЩs the voice of the void between the ends of the horseshoe. Certainly, it could be where the anti-Semitism of the right overlaps the anti-Israeli views of what is being called the тАЬextreme leftтАЭ. I have never felt sympathetic to what some regard as the тАЬclassicтАЭ extreme left of the Marxist-Leninists.
IтАЩve always thought of myself as championing the left as generally defined as compassion and basic human kindness, of income distribution to achieve a more just society. How does social democracy devolve into cheering on the baby killers? If you take a horseshoe and extend the lines you get half of an infinity sign.
It takes the situation getting so bad that something has to be done. Otherwise people will just suck it up, complain, and grind through their days.
Autocrats and oligarchs count on that. You can let things get bad and corrupt and oppressive so long as they don't get TOO bad, corrupt or oppressive... and if you turn the screws slowly enough, it can get pretty bad before the break point comes.
One of the realities is that the people will often turn on each other before they turn on the shitheads that are actually the problem.
Actually, the тАЬshitheadsтАЭ are the symptoms of the problem in D.C. The problem is a voter base untethered from reality who vote the shitheads into office. Our MAGA neighbors are responsible.
People do vote this shitheads into office, but there are a lot of things going on that facilitate the shitheads being in position to get elected (and having the money and media support to get noticed and elected)... and who the particular shitheads are.
What most of these politicians don't realize is that they are easily replaceable. There are hundreds or thousands of people JUST LIKE THEM out there that would be able to fill their shoes, provided they get the necessary visibility and support.
This used to be provided by the GoP as an institution. Now a lot of it comes from the media and PACs.
I agree with all this, but I'll add a caveat from personal experience:
A harsh Sunni-Shia civil war broke out during the years I got sent to Iraq (the civil war lasted from approximately early '06 until early '08). The sectarian violence that ensued was far worse for Iraqi civilians than what AQI was doing to the Iraqi government forces and US forces combined. The Sunni/Shia militias went after the other side's civilians almost exclusively (they also went after US troops and the Iraqi army/police, but they primarily went after their domestic opponents). There were something like 160,000+ civilians that died during the Iraq war, and the bulk of them were during this sectarian violence that occurred between Sunni and Shia for about 2 years--a prelude to what would happen later under ISIS after the Syrian civil war gave it room to grow and spill over the border in 2013. The thing is, sometime around late '07/early '08, the Sunni populace of Iraq turned on AQI. They had enough of their people dying at the hands of Shia militias and Iraqi/US forces (sometimes the Shia militias *were* the Iraqi police btw), and they turned on AQI and stopped supporting them. I sometimes wonder if something like this could happen between the Palestinian populace and Hamas, and if it could, perhaps this is the kind of thing that would turn the conflict and give way to something like a foreseeable end state where it's not Palestinian militants being in charge of the populace and allow real negotiations on a 2-state solution taking place. I just don't know how easy it would be for us to get there considering how much popular support Hamas (and Fatah in the WB) enjoy from the Palestinian populace. That said, I would have thought the same in 2006 regarding Sunni public support for AQI, so who knows what is possible in the future.
I have read recently that West Bank Palestinians have grown increasingly disenchanted with feckless Fatah and its blatant corruption. Hamas is making inroads there with its extremist appeals, but they are just as corrupt, stealing humanitarian aid meant for civilians and using it for terrorism.
Fuck both Hamas and Fatah. Things will change for the Palestinians when the Palestinian men get tired of bootlicking these grifters and decide to start killing them or diming them out to the IDF instead. Doesn't even have to be most Palestinian men willing to do this, just enough of them.
Historical experience tells me that this is possible. That historical experience also tells me that it doesn't happen until things break down to a certain point. The actual locus of that point is a contingent factor (how much is the normal population willing and able to put up with before it acts).
One of our big problems is that the system (whatever that system is) tends to work hard to project/create a sense of normalcy. The media with its both-siderism and pursuit of profit (and its increased atomization). The political parties playing at business as usual. The sullen acceptance of the "regular" people because that is what they )think) they are stuck with--and things aren't So bad after all, right?
It is less, I think, complacency than it is a fear of making things worse. The fear of making things worse (or of change per se) holds things in place until things get bad enough that people are willing to take the chance.
People can only affect change through either through cultural change over time or by spasms of activity (usually in th4e form of violence).
It is going to require the mass of Palestinians to repudiate what is currently their "leadership" structure (both HAMAs and the Palestinian Authority).
тАЬ It is less, I think, complacency than it is a fear of making things worse. The fear of making things worse (or of change per se) holds things in place until things get bad enough that people are willing to take the chance.тАЭ
This is a moment among many when I feel that international examples of violence recapitulates domestic violence in families. (I probably have that inverted; domestic violence recapitulates international violence). The same psychological forces are in play.
You're right that that "breaking point" has to happen before a population turns on their militant overlords, and maybe that will or won't happen in our lifetimes. But it IS possible. A counter-point to what I said is that the Sunni-Shia civil war was young when the Sunnis turned their back on AQI, whereas the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has gone on for a very long time and has become embedded in the culture on both sides. That's a whole lot of generational momentum to overcome that wasn't present in Iraq necessarily--albeit, the Shia had suffered under Sunni autocratic rule since 1963--so this isn't necessarily apples to oranges.
It's kind of like William T Sherman's outlook on protracted warfare: тАЬWar is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.тАЭ I think he was talking about the necessity for a "breaking point" to end warfare, and that cruelty and overwhelming suffering is what is often necessary to bring that "breaking point" about. That's why he burned down the South. The story of Imperial Japan tells a similar story when it came to defeating their own religious martyrdom culture after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sometimes a peoples need to look cultural and societal extinction in the eye before collectively throwing in the towel.
When I use the phrases: there is no solution or a solution is not possible; it doesn't mean that there aren't solutions.
Indeed, solutions can usually be identified or are actually know/recognized.
A solution is not possible because there isn't sufficient motivation for the necessary CHANGE. The existing cultural/political inertia cannot be overcome.
It cannot be overcome because existing conditions are not bad enough to drive change. People are getting by. There is not a strong enough perception (because it is often a matter of perception) to drive change.
This is why we are continually kicking the can down the road. People are unwilling to change the existing state, so issues are ignored or short term "solutions" are applied. Reference the various "compromises" that occurred in the lead up to the Civil War.
Things actually have to get pretty bad to drive change. That badness has to be immediate and clear. But (again) realize that this is a function of PERCEPTION.
The perception of threat to the institution of slavery by the Southern master class (and the essential nature of that institution) were enough to precipitate a crisis.
Except their action led to the swift demise of what they sought to preserve.
By the same token, the efforts to preserve racism and sexism in the US may well precipitate the crisis that effectively ends them as they currently exist.
A substantive number of people are absolutely resistant to change. Change is dangerous--and better the danger and discomfort that you know, than the unknown danger and discomfort that might arise. Even people who will ultimately benefit from change will tend to resist it.
Better the devil you know.
This makes it VERY difficult to proactively change things to stop the bad. The bad must, in essence, happen for the change to happen.
An autocratic system can force/coerce change (but not always successfully and not always in a functional direction). A democratic system usually cannot until the crisis point is reached.
One can see history as a series of crises that drive change. Think of it as evolutionary pressure, shifts in environment that are either adapted to or that cause extinction.
And, because we often do not change until a crisis hits, the change is not managed well. It turns into something akin to a crapshoot. You never know where you will end up (which only contributes further to a fear and avoidance of change).
You are correct, for the moment. Emotions are incredibly high right now, deservedly so. And the biggest challenge for people is to be able to share the emotions and distress without going to an extreme, point-of-very-hard-to-return-from place.
You don't win a game of whack-a-mole by refusing to whack the moles just because they keep moving from hole to hole or hiding among the non-moles either. This is the essence of the conundrum for Israel.
As I've said here elsewhere, this conflict only ends when the Palestinian people start killing Hamas instead of licking their boots. If they can insurgency against the better-armed IDF, they can insurgency against Hamas too. In fact, they live in the same neighborhood as Hamas and know where they sleep at night, so it's a lot easier to kill Hamas terrorists than it is to kill IDF soldiers.
"If they can insurgency against the better-armed IDF, they can insurgency against Hamas too. In fact, they live in the same neighborhood as Hamas and know where they sleep at night, so it's a lot easier to kill Hamas terrorists than it is to kill IDF soldiers."
I agree with the need to whack the moles. But it wasn't members of the general populace that took on the IDF. It's a lot to expect that the Palestinian populace will rise up en masse to take on Hamas. As both you and Mercer have pointed out things have to get pretty bad before reaching the breaking point.
Maybe the Israeli response will be enough to force that this time. But I wouldn't count on it, as I am sure that you aren't.
Civilians would be murdering Hamas members, who are not civilians, but Hamas would be murdering civilians to protect itself from the civilians rising up against them. If the Palestinian civilians are already dying from IDF counter-attacks, why not die killing Hamas terrorists instead? Because at least when Hamas dies off the IDF bombs stop. If they keep fighting the IDF in the name of Hamas, the IDF counter-attacks never stop and peace never becomes possible. That's the game theory approach. The Palestinian civilians are dying either way, so why not die fighting against Hamas terrorists until they are finished off (a lot easier than finishing off the IDF) and then there can be a peace worked out from there with potential statehood at the end of the tunnel. The solution is pretty fucking simple to me (as a non-Palestinian) and the Sunnis abandoning AQI to end the Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq (and the insurgency campaign against the US/Iraqi government) is a great example. Had the Sunnis and Shia just kept killing each other there wouldn't have been five years of relative peace until ISIS came over the border in 2013. In fact, a protracted Sunni-Shia civil war would have given ISIS a lot more shelter in Iraq had it still been going on in 2013.
Although I understand your reasoning it seems to me it would just devolve into civil war in Gaza and I'm not sure which side would win. Hamas is surely better armed and organized. That would give them the edge.
ItтАЩs like the crusading Jesuits rationalizing that itтАЩs okay to kill you in an effort to save your souls by conversion to Christianity because if I didnтАЩt even try, your soul is damned anyway so it doesnтАЩt matter. ItтАЩs ratiocination run amok.
If you refuse to whack the moles because you're afraid of accidently whacking non-moles, then you'll never beat the moles.
The non-moles have a vote here too. They're not getting the moles out of their neighborhood on their own accord. If the men of Palestine can find the courage to fight an insurgency against a much better armed IDF, they can find the courage to kick Hamas out of their neighborhood with violence. It is because they are too timid and loyal to Hamas that the moles living among them (Hamas terrorists) keep getting whacked by the anti-moles (Israel), with high levels of non-moles (Palestinian civilians) getting hit as an unintended consequence. If Palestinians kick out Hamas, the bombs stop falling in their neighborhood and a real peace solution becomes a possibility. The problem is that there are too many Palestinian men licking Hamas' boots instead of killing them.
Just imagine that the hostage taker is inside of your house and shooting wildly at everyone else inside while holding the hostage and it'll make more sense. In the scenario you're thinking about, the hostage taker only poses a threat to the hostage and not to the police and other civilians around them.
No, your scenario still entails shooting the hostage. I mean, if you want to kill the hostage in an attempt to save other hostages, then say so. Because again, there are one million child hostages and washing your hands of their potential deaths isnтАЩt the civilized thing either.
I've been balls deep in a counter-insurgency campaign and an Iraqi civil war. I speak to this stuff from experience. When the Sunnis in Iraq abandoned Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni-Shia civil war stopped and so did the insurgency campaign against the US and Iraqi government. This shit in Israel only stops when the Palestinians are willing to kick out Hamas the way Iraqi Sunnis kicked out AQI there. Until then, a terrorist group remains in control of a place that will never become an independent nation so long as said terrorist group (Hamas) remains in power over them with no Palestinian military group challenging them for power so they can negotiate a 2-state solution in good faith.
That's why it'd be a lot easier for Palestinians to get rid of Hamas instead of Israel. The Palestinians know which families are Hamas because they live in the same communities and know the factions. This conflict ends when the Palestinians decide that they've had enough of their militant overlords and start killing them off instead of licking their boots (or sandals).
How strongly is the general Palestinian population bound to Hamas by a shared hatred of the Jews? It might take a truly existential threat to break that. By which I mean mass, mass casualties.
"agreed..but i cant see Palestinians wishing this whilst dodging israeli bombs."
I could have said the same thing about the Iraqi Sunni turning on AQI while in the middle of a Sunni-Shia civil war and an active insurgency against the US military and Iraqi government, but they did, and it ended both the Sunni-Shia civil war and the insurgency campaign against the US & Iraqi government. Shit is possible, it just takes a real breaking point and a willing partner to help get the counter-Hamas insurgency off the ground (funding and arms from the Israeli government to anti-Hamas Palestinians groups in Gaza willing to negotiate a 2-state solution with the Israeli gov once Hamas is gone).
I am appalled by Hamas, including their taking of hostages. But what are "human shields" but hostages? Why is it OK to kill one but not the other?
Some people are going on about how it's OK because the Palestinians elected Hamas. So I checked. In 2006 Hamas got 44.45% of the vote; Fatah got 41.43%. Shortly thereafter, violence between Hamas and Fatah resulted in Fatah being thrown out and Hamas taking over. Kinda like what happens under many an authoritarian governments. One can only assume that 41.43% of Gazan voters were at least mildly pissed.
Then came the blockade of Gaza in 2007, which has been going on for 14 years. The socioeconomic effect on Gaza has been profound. It seems plausible that more Gazans support Hamas than once did. But it also seems plausible that citizens of ANY country who suffered a similar blockade because their government was authoritarian, even violent against the blockading country, would develop a sense of unity against the blockader. Even then, before the recent events, the a survey of Gazans who "supported" Hamas was at 68%, whatever "support" means. At that point, 32% were not in support DESPITE the blockade. But that 32% is being bombed and denied electricity and water just as much as the rest.
It is difficult to come up with a comparable situation elsewhere in the world, though treatment of the Kurds comes to mind, or the Armenians in whichever -Stan it is that expelled them recently. At least the Armenians were allowed to leave the country.
I hate the utter hypocrisy of so many of the GOP leaders. I am supposed to support the hypocrisy of Israel "warning" Palestinians to leave when there is no place to go? Has Israel made any attempt to find a place where evacuees could go, with the idea of a return once Hamas is obliterated? Even if it is just women and children? If they have, I'd like to hear of it. But the plight of refugees trying to escape to European countries bodes ill for finding such a place. Egypt doesn't want refugees, much as the US doesn't at the Mexican border. Would the US take women and children from Gaza? Excuse me while I choke.
This is really well put. I am kind of sick of these people who point out the crazies on the left as a strawman for the entire left. If you look at congress democrats itтАЩs literally 256 out of like 261 who donтАЩt absolutely support Israel. Finding people with no power that say stupid shit is easy. FFS, Biden probably gave the most pro-Israel speech in history and these writers are pointing out Harvard student groups. Who cares.
I donтАЩt think one is тАЬbetterтАЭ. IтАЩm saying they are different, and the difference is in the perpetrators. IтАЩm struggling with it, but I know that torturing someone to death in front of your own eyes is a higher order crime that requires an irredeemable very darkness of the soul.
One can be pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel, and anti-Hamas at the same time. This isn't that hard people. Hamas needs to go.
How easy is it to be pro-Israel and anti-Netanyahu?
Hamas may need to go, but removing it will require significant ground operations. That's almost certain to mean significant Israeli casualties. Is Israel prepared for thousands of military casualties? Israel could instead just flatten Gaza, but then all the surviving Gazans would be Israel's to deal with.
I'm no general, but I'm skeptical Israel could BOTH destroy Hamas AND keep Gazan civilian casualties under 100K.
I know I am supposed to have empathy for the residents of Gaza. I know that.
However, I also know that these are the same people who in 2006 voted Hamas into power in Gaza. I get it--Fatah and the Palestinian Authority were massively corrupt. I get it. I also know what was in the Hamas Charter (as did a fair portion of the residents of Gaza who were voting) in its 1988 version (it was revised in 2017) that they campaigned upon, and more than a few Gazans knew as well. Most of these idiot leftists have zero clue about the contents. From my point of view, a good chunk of Gazans *knew* exactly what they were getting with a vote for Hamas. The levels of anti-semitism rival Mein Kampf.
From a certain perspective, the people of Gaza set this into motion in 2006. When you vote for vile and the vileness ultimately attacks and destroys *you*, it is very difficult to have empathy for you. The stove was hot, you knew it was hot, and touched it anyway. It's tough to care about what happens to you after that.
I know that makes me a bad person...but it is difficult to be charitable when you see a soldier lifting the corpse of a dead infant on your television screen.
The question is how do you get rid of Hamas? Hamas isn't a set of people, to a larger degree it's an ideology. It's a group of people who are committed to the destruction of Israel, who think that Jews do not have the right to exist.
Sure, there's leadership. But I doubt they're still dumb enough to be on the Strip. As usual, they'll let civilians and their lieutenants take the hit.
Consider demographics in particular. There are 2.1 million residents of the Gaza Strip. HALF are under the age of 15 years-old.
So far more than 6,000 bombs have been dropped in the Israeli counter-attack, there are indications that white phosphorous is being used, and so far 1,537 Palestinians have been killed тАУ including 500 children and 276 women. Given the demographics, I suspect the number of fatalities of minors (meaning someone under the age of 18) are being undercounted.
Also, all water has been cut off by Israel, as well as electricity and fuel necessary to power generators in hospitals. When former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett was asked by a British journalist yesterday what was going to happen to Palestinian babies in incubators, he replied, "Are you seriously asking me about Palestinian civilians? What is wrong with you? We're fighting Nazis."
My fear is that if the Israeli counter-attack is massively disproportionate in terms of the impact on civilians, that it will turn into a recruitment tool for Hamas. So if they end up taking out 15 civilians (assume each of these has 4 family members who care deeply for them) in order to kill a single Hamas terrorist, sure they've killed 1 terrorist, but in the process they've created a pool of 60 aggrieved people that are targets for recruitment for Hamas (or a similar terrorist organization).
This isn't a theoretical scenario. The exact same thing happened with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The international coalition could never eliminate the Taliban, because every stray drone bomb that ended up hitting a wedding created a dozen new recruits.
It is both in the best security interests of Israel and in the safety interests of Palestinian civilians, for the response to be proportionate.
"The question is how do you get rid of Hamas? Hamas isn't a set of people, to a larger degree it's an ideology. It's a group of people who are committed to the destruction of Israel, who thinks that Jews do not have the right to exist."
The same way we got Sunnis in Iraq to abandon Al Qaeda and end the Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq in '08: by their own internal decision-making.
The only people who can truly get rid of Hamas are the Palestinians themselves, because they know where Hamas sleeps at night and which families/tribes they belong to. If Palestinian men can fight an insurgency against a better-armed IDF, they can fight an easier insurgency against Hamas. All it takes is *enough*--not all--of Palestinian men to realize that Hamas isn't their friend and indeed is holding their children back from having a better future via their refusal to negotiate with Israel on a future 2-state solution and their refusal to reject the tenants of their platform (that all Jews must die and that Israel isn't allowed to exist). As long as Palestinian men keep licking Hamas' boots instead of killing them, there will be no peace. It's up to the Palestinian men to reject and kill off Hamas. Until they do, Hamas will remain in power and keep them in the violence trap of martyrdom culture and zero tolerance for Jews.
The rest of your point about military over-reactions impeding counter-insurgency goals is a valid one, and I witnessed it first hand on the ground in Iraq. Killing civilians does in fact harden a local populace against the occupier. That conflict only settled down (until 2013 with ISIS coming across the border from the Syrian civil war) because the Sunnis rejected their governing militants in the midst of a Sunni-Shia civil war on top of an insurgency against a foreign occupying military. The men of Afghanistan did not reject the Taliban via violence the way Iraqi Shia and eventually Iraqi Sunnis did with AQI. Until Palestinians are willing to fight their own militant overlords, this conflict never goes away.
Damn, that's a good question. Took me a lot of thinking, research, and analysis to come up with this answer which I'm sure many could validly critique.
I'll start with your last suggestion 1st. I mean every single Jewish person who was born in Europe and who survived the Holocaust didn't permanently lose their citizenship (meaning sure, Nazi occupiers did not treat them as citizens and revoked all their rights, but the second the Nazis were defeated, it's not like Jews had to re-apply for citizenship, it was assumed).
Prior to the war there was a vibrant community of Jewish folks all over Europe who were full citizens. After the war, they all had the right to return to their homes in Europe, and even had a right to all of their homes and pilfered property (whether they were able to ACTUALLY be fully compensated is another matter). But as you'd imagine, after your fellow citizens murdered MILLIONS of your relatives & fellow Jews with systematic cruelty and brutality, AND with pretty substantial complicity by civilian Europeans, you'd imagine that a significant portion of the Jewish population had absolutely no desire to return to Europe. I sure as hell wouldn't have gone back. I actually find it surprising that any Jews returned to Germany voluntarily in particular.
Accordingly, the establishment of a state where any Jewish person was entitled to emigrate to after WWII was a practical necessity. It was either that or forcing a bunch of Jewish people who were rightly terrified about returning to Europe to go back, which would have obviously been horrendously cruel.
Even without knowing what I know now about the history that would transpire, the British/UN approach of just designating an area in what is now modern day Israel as the new Jewish state, notwithstanding that there were people from all faiths already living in that land, had about as much sensitivity and common sense as all the other idiotic things that colonialists did after WWI and WWII (they essentially drew arbitrary borders all over the place based on superficial criteria (e.g. they way they drew the borders for an independent India and Pakistan).
So yes, finding a proper parcel of land somewhere like South America that had good fertile land, where the local government and its residents were voluntarily willing to sell the land for proper compensation would have been the ideal solution.
But who are we kidding? After WWII, Western nations would have negotiated with a totally undemocratic government in South America to acquire the land, and would just have just screwed over the residents in the process (which would likely set off its own cycle of violence). But, ASSUMING that the purchase had been properly done, that would have been the best way to avoid this cycle of misery and bloodshed for the last 70 years.
However, if we want to be honest about how Zionists managed to legally acquire land in what currently forms part of Israel, it wasn't exactly voluntary on the part of the colonizers.
The Zionist movement is historically relatively recent (Jewish people have not been claiming exclusive rights over certain territory in the "Holy Land" for 2000+ years). Zionism really only took off between 1882 and 1903, when approximately 35,000 Jews moved to Palestine. At the time, the area was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.
After WWI, the British were given control over the area after the Ottoman Empire was defeated, by the League of Nations in 1922. The British were brazenly anti-Semitic in ruling the area leading to justified resentment of the Brits by the Jewish population.
Then during WWII a ton of pro-Zionist Jews illegally settled in the area (I say "illegally" mostly because the Brits were bastards about allowing Jews to escape Europe during this time period, imposing quotas, taxes, etc. as did the U.S. and Canada). So in 1946, Zionist militias started engaging in guerilla warfare and terrorism against the British authorities to gain independence.
By 1947 the Brits gave up and just allowed the UN to determine a partition agreement creating a Jewish state.
Accordingly, by the time that an independent state of Israel was legally established by the UN, it was already a fait accomplis. I think there were something like 800K Jews already living there, fighting to stay there.
So I seriously doubt the Jewish settlers would have accepted a random parcel of land in South America after how hard they fought to gain independence from Britain in the preceding years, in areas that are now part of Israel.
All of which to say that with all the hindsight in the world, as of 1947, it was pretty much inevitable that a Jewish state would be established in the middle-east.
I mean short of travelling back in time to 1882 and persuading Zionists to pick another random chunk of land, this was inevitable.
But of course, back in 1882 there was absolutely no reason why the international community would come together and purchase a random parcel of land in South America to establish a Jewish state. Only the Holocaust created that impetus, at which point it was waaaaay too late to establish a Jewish state elsewhere.
I should end by noting however, that I'm not comfortable with the idea of any country being a "preferential democracy" where members of a particular religion get preferential treatment in perpetuity. There should have been a reasonable time-limit for Jewish refugees after WWII to get preferential treatment in resettlement in whatever parcel of land was given to them.
I find it fundamentally offensive that to this day, ANYONE of the Jewish faith, with zero connection to the land for thousands of years, can automatically get Israeli citizenship, while Palestinian refugees who fled the area in the war of 1948 or were expelled from the area by Zionist militias have no right to go back to physical homes in what is now Israel, that their families held for generations (Egypt has stated that they do not want to accept a mass exodus of Palestinian refugees into Egypt, in part because Israel has not, and will not, guarantee their right to return after the counter-offensive is completed, a concern that is 100% legitimate given the history post-1948. And obviously because no country in the world has the means to absorb 2.3 million refugees overnight).
Don't get me wrong, I know why Israel has established a preferential democracy: the Palestinian-Muslim birthrate far exceeds that of the Israeli Jewish birthrate, so if Palestinians were granted the right to return with full citizenship, they would democratically end preferential treatment for Jews, which would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
As has been stated by people much smarter than me: "You can be a religious state, or you can be a democracy. You can't be both."
Yes, that is very true - but not very useful in this situation. What actions does this collection of attitudes dicate? Hamas needs to go - but how to convert this from a wish into a reality without horrible consequences to civilians? I think it is hard.
You get the Palestinian people to turn on Hamas the way Iraqi Sunnis turned on AQI in late '07/early '08. Hamas exists as the governing body in Gaza because 1) a whole lot of Palestinians support them--some out of fear, and 2) nobody is challenging Hamas violently. If the Palestinian people started killing Hamas members and challenging their rule, well hey, now there's a whole world of possibilities for peace. All it takes is enough Palestinian men doing the same kind of insurgency they do against the IDF to Hamas instead. Until that happens, Hamas stays in charge and peace becomes impossible.
Seems like people are having a hard time being human Travis.
Flared emotions will do that. Makes it easy to forget who you and others are.
Pretty much. It is largely an irreconcilable position to be pro-peace and pro-Hamas. Hamas has no interest in peace or regard for the well being of the people of Gaza, and never will. This has frankly been evident for years, and the threads of anti-Semitism that have moved some of our own far left into adopting HamasтАЩ rhetoric framing Israel as a colonial state in order to equate its existence with old grievances that modern multiculturalism is too ready to adopt as its own are slick and disturbing.
This is not a bash on multiculturalism -- it is a necessary viewpoint on modern life in the US. However, not all struggles are the same, and the Jewish people in Israel are far more indigenous than the descendants of Arab and Turkish conquerors who now call themselves Palestinians. The times and peoples will change in many ways over centuries of population shifts, though, and today there will be no single, homogenous state of either sort without ethnic cleansing (which IтАЩm old enough to remember when we all agreed this was a bad thing to do).
In short, we can get rid of Hamas, but the core problem is that there are two peoples who both very, very badly want the old holy sites and are not terribly interested in sharing. The Israelis are usually more tolerant than the Palestinians about this, but their patience has limits when they see no serious partners for peace.
I don't completely disagree with your point, but I would like to shout out to Palestinians who engage with and are a part of the government of Israel. It's not that Palestinians don't want to share. Like here, the problem is fanatics who want to kill anyone willing to share.
Agree with all of what you said *except* for the part about Jewish people being more indigenous to the region than the Palestinians. If you look at the ratio of Arabs to Jews living in Palestine when the Balfour Declaration was announced in 1917, it was something like 5.5:1 Arab-to-Jew. Ashkenazi Jews from Europe began immigrating en masse to Palestine under the British Mandate from 1917-1939, gradually bringing that ratio closer to equilibrium. So many Ashkenazi Jews from Europe were immigrating--particularly during the 1930's for obvious reasons--that the British announced the White Paper Act of 1939 that put quota caps on immigration numbers for Ashkenazi Jews coming into Palestine from Europe. When this act was announced in 1939, the Haganah--the IDF's forerunner--began conducting terrorist attacks against the British in opposition to the White Paper Act from 1939-1948. Then the British vacated their mandate in 1948 and announced the creation of an additional country (Israel), and the rest is the history we know about. Make no mistake, the Arabs owned Palestine well before Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants out-migrated the birth rate of the domestic Arab populace.
Just think about how pissed off about "open borders" MAGA is and then think about how insane they'd go if Central and South Americans were coming here in such large numbers that they start eclipsing the "native" white people in a matter of 30 years and that's kind of what the Palestinians were going nuts over from 1917-1948. The rest is history.
A look at the demographic numbers over time here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region)
Yes and no. The Ashkenazi Jews did indeed mostly come over the last century in order to flee Russian and German pogroms, and youтАЩre not going to believe this, but those folks were someone done with the idea of other people telling them they didnтАЩt deserve a place of their own. However, there was a pre-existing Jewish population that has been in the general area of modern day Israel since they first fled the Pharaoh. Conversely, the Arab descendants came with the conquests of the Turks around the same time as the Frankish military incursions that some westerners romanticize as тАЬthe CrusadesтАЭ that rose up as the Turks started preventing European pilgrims from reaching the holy land and, to a large degree, had the main effect of destroying the remnants of the old eastern Roman Empire that were centered around what is now Istanbul. Nonetheless, there was basically zero Turkish settlement of modern Israel/Palestine that wasnтАЩt predicated upon having the most swords they could agree to point in the same direction.
However, after World War II, the Jewish sense of humor for not having a state to call their own pretty much flatlined. Since theyтАЩd already started migrating to what is now Israel in greater numbers, they decided it was time to return there. The descendants of the Arabs and Turks, having had the run of the place for most of the previous millennium, were not particularly interested in ceding supremacy of the place, but as you may imagine, the Jews were pretty much done with writing their history on othersтАЩ terms. After the wars that immediately followed, both Israel and their neighbors expelled millions of Jews and Muslims, which each settled in the othersтАЩ territory. The vast majority of modern Israelis are as much the descendants of recent refugees as the Palestinians who havenтАЩt resettled in Egypt, Lebanon, or Jordan. Israel has just been more sympathetic to bettering the lives of fleeing Jews than their neighbors have been to the Palestinians.
Either way, the historical and cultural ties of Jews to that area go back several millennia; the PalestiniansтАЩ only go back one.
The Mexicans have a longer history of living in CA, NM, AZ, and TX than Americans do. Should they get to call dibs on claiming it back in the name of their historical occupancy? How about the Native American claims to the whole county minus Hawaii and Alaska? How about China's historical claims to the 9-dashed-line in the South and East China Seas? Canvassing similar claims of historical rights starts to give one a sense that they don't mean shit past a certain expiration date--and in China's case actually gives off a lot of militant imperialism vibes.
Except there is a millennia-old indigenous history in both Hawaii and Alaska and archeology to back it up, when done properly.
It's not that you don't have a point, but your analogy breaks down for this reason: since taking over formerly Mexican territories, Americans have created tons of very costly/profitable/useful/culturally significant things in these states, especially CA and TX: the greatest movie studio on earth, an iconic theme park, multiple powerhouse biomedical research centers, a NASA space center, etc. etc. etc. not to mention an absolute butt-ton of housing and infrastructure such as highways, ports, solar and wind farms, etc.
If America were to hand that over to Mexico now, it would be giving up God only knows how many billions of dollars, and it would be only fair for Mexico to reimburse America in some way. (Of course it won't happen, this is purely hypothetical).
In contrast, when the state of Israel was created, what did the Israelis take from the Palestinians by way of preexisting infrastructure/powerhouse industrial centers? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing it wasn't much, was it?
Major caveat: of course, both Jews and Muslims consider Jerusalem their Holy City, so Jews taking over Jerusalem would be horrible in devout Muslims' eyes. The answer here is to have some kind of joint oversight of Temple Mount by Jews and Muslims, and to divide Jerusalem between Israel and the Palestinian state/West Bank.
The reason that CA and TX got so profitable is because they were resource rich to begin with (oil/gas in TX, agriculture in CA), and large amounts of water were diverted to CA in the case of its agriculture (to say nothing of its own rare mineral wealth). To my knowledge, oil wasn't a huge deal in the 1840's when we took the American SW from Mexico as we were still transitioning from sailing ships to steam-powered ones fueled by coal. Oil became really important around the time WWII was being fought (a good look at this energy transition can be found here: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=10), and so Texas' natural resource wealth didn't really come into the picture until a good 100 years after it was taken.
Israel took water aquifers from Palestine via the West Bank. In order to make agriculture work in that arid part of the world, you need fresh water sourcing, which is the reason why Israel invests so much in desalinization plants for fresh water production. The Jordan River aquifers in the West Bank are one of the main reasons Israel doesn't want to cede those territories to a future Palestinian state. I guess my point here overall is that industry isn't what's in question, material resources are, and the prevalence of industry often relies on the presence of those resources to begin with. Would Texas be Texas if it weren't for its oil/gas wealth?
OK, you make a very good point. But in a counterfactual world in which America gave CA and TX back to Mexico in the early 20th century, or never conquered them in the first place, would we have Hollywood, the Texas Medical Center, and Disneyland? I'm guessing not. Natural resources matter, but so do institutions and governments. (Would a hypothetical Mexico that had never lost CA and TX be wealthier than today's actual Mexico? Most likely. Would it also have better institutions? Who knows?)
Re: sharing aquifers and water rights in Palestine/Israel, that is a logistical, bread-and-butter question that is very important and also downstream of "can Palestinians agree to let Israel exist without repeatedly killing Israelis y/n?"
If Palestinians settled down to peaceful two-state coexistence with Israel, I'd be 100% in favor of wealthy nations donating $$$ for building a giant desalination plant in Gaza, heck, I'd be happy to donate some of my own money.
To be fair, we might be better off as a country without Hollywood and Disneyland (less decadence, distraction, and complacency as a peoples). The Texas Medical Center might not even exist had oil and gas not become relevant, because Texas wouldn't be rich enough to stand it up without that mineral wealth.
I imagine everyone would be happy to build giant desal plants as an aided compromise in getting to a 2-state solution. The problem is that Israel doesn't want to give up those lands and Hamas would rather fight Israel than govern a country of its own (see the Taliban's recent governing headaches after finally catching the car and getting the US to leave). So even if the world offered, Israel might not take it and Hamas definitely wouldn't. This conflict only ever ends when the Palestinians abandon/kill off Hamas and when Israel decides that it's willing to give up the land it's currently letting its own settlers inhabit.
"we might be better off as a country without Hollywood and Disneyland"
Booooooo
Substack really needs a downvote button! :)
People know more about the lives of Hollywood celebrities and worship their wealth while allowing the rise of a billionaire class and knowing fuck all about foreign policy or economics, but sure, Hollywood is a national blessing lol (I may or may not be jaded about American culture haha)
Oh, I donтАЩt disagree with that at all. We could make a similar case for the Germans who were pushed out of modern Poland into their current borders. However, the Germans themselves (as well as most of the peoples you describe) have generally chosen to consider these settled matters, because they know that any future reopening of the matter will not improve said settlement.
The Palestinians, for whatever reason, have not chosen to do so. The religious and ethnic elements of it are a thing, but thatтАЩs been the case for population shifts for centuries. Whenever I see them speaking of the тАЬNakba,тАЭ I can only just kind of groan and say тАЬyou lost, get over it.тАЭ Some time in the next decade or two, the last people with any real memory of that time will be gone; weтАЩre already at a place where pretty much no one who lived there as an adult in a different time is left. Their children can figure out a different way... if they want to.
Should Ukrainians simply "get over it" and accept that they've lost Crimea and the Donbas? It's been almost a decade since they've lost it. It's a tricky thing deciding when the terms of resistance should logically expire.
Ideally, no, but youтАЩre also not 100% wrong in the implication. The Ukrainians may realistically come to a conclusion that they canтАЩt actually take Crimea and Donbas back by force without overt NATO involvement. Russia, for all their saber rattling, is meticulously seeking to avoid having any of their munitions even accidentally crossing NATO borders, and NATO is similarly avoiding anyone who answers to a western capitol fire a shot inside Ukraine, for the same reason: that turns this into World War III very quickly, and the spectre of human civilization ending in a half hour time span makes that Something No One Wants.
So our calculus/balance is, give Ukraine enough to make Russia want to get out, without doing so much that this escalates in that fashion. Obviously weтАЩre in a place where we think that trend line will be in UkraineтАЩs favor unless Trump wins the election and pulls the rug out from under them. Russia, in turn, is assuming we wonтАЩt have the patience to do so.
That said... if weтАЩre wrong, and Ukraine canтАЩt do this before they run out of disposable bodies? Yes, theyтАЩre functionally going to have to make some other deal where they let Russia keep this stuff, but Russia is also forced to accept that whatтАЩs left is going straight into NATO, so there will be no further тАЬborder edit warsтАЭ going forward.
I guess that whole international "rules based order" is a lot more fickle than we're willing to admit (or selectively enforce for that matter). Taiwan better watch its fucking back lol.
I did write and then delete a sub paragraph in there where I observed that there is a debate to be had about whether nuclear weapons have improved the world by preventing major powers from directly fighting, or made it worse by enabling bad actors with nukes to get away with whatever they want because the consequences of stopping them are always worse than letting them.
Two thought experiments on that: 1. What happens in Ukraine if nukes didnтАЩt exist? The likely answer IMO is тАЬweтАЩre probably already in World War III to get Russia out.тАЭ 2. What if Hitler (and most of the major former Allies) had had nukes in 1938, or if heтАЩd waited a decade to make his move until he did? The likely answer is, he probably doesnтАЩt ever invade France and the USSR, but France and Britain probably donтАЩt directly declare war to keep him away from the Czechs and the Poles, either. OR the central European countries along with Belgium and Holland put themselves under a French and British nuclear umbrella much like NATO today, and Hitler wouldve cynically picked on everyone who wasnтАЩt, much as Putin is doing today. Is that a better world than our having consigned the Nazis to the ashbins of history when they went too far? That is... highly questionable.
If nukes keep the peace then we shouldn't be worried about nuclear proliferation, we should be encouraging it. In my opinion, the inverse is the reality: the presence of nukes prevents potential world war at the expense of enabling genocide and atrocity. We didn't go into N Korea because they have nukes. We went into Iraq because they didn't. Nukes often enable countries to do awful shit without consequences because anyone who would think to stop them is too worried about nuclear retaliation--which is why we fucked up Saddam when he went into Kuwait in '91 but we didn't lay a finger on Putin when he went into Ukraine in '22. If Hitler had nukes when he launched the Blitzkreig in '40, would the US have invaded Europe in '44?
Welll.... Crimea is a bit of a special case, because, afaik, it used to be part of Russia until Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine (when Ukraine was part of the USSR, of course).
That said, Russia is freaking HUGE and yet they're still trying to grab more land for themselves, because Putin is a bloodthirsty scumbag. Israel is a TINY sliver of land that is literally the only homeland of the Jewish people. Everywhere else that Jews live, they live surrounded by a Gentile majority, with a very strong cultural memory of "yes, things are cool now, but the majority could turn on us (see: 1000 years of pogroms, expulsions, witch hunts, topped off with the f**king Holocaust)." To paraphrase something Steven Pinker wrote, given the history of the Jewish people, their tenacity in holding onto their land can hardly be held against them.
Crimea is important because it's the only warm water port that Russia currently owns (it leases some out of Syria, which is why that civil war was so important to them). Without a warm water port, they can't import/export year round in an efficient manner (they have to use ice breakers in the north several months a year to inefficiently make up the difference, and even then can't power project their military into the med or atlantic nearly as easily).
Satanists and gypsies don't have their own country, shall we start carving off parts of other people's territory to accommodate them and give them a country of their own? Where's the Theodore Hertzel of the Uighurs or Sufi Islamists at? They don't have a country of their own either. Even the African slaves we brought to the US stuck around after the civil war despite the pogroms they endured. They didn't just carve off a chunk of Liberia for themselves and "go back to Africa" as was often suggested back then--including from Lincoln at one point if I recall correctly.
It's not that I'm against Israel holding onto land, it's that I'm against Israel holding onto its war conquests while denying statehood for some other groups of peoples. Why do the Jews deserve self-determination and statehood while the Palestinians don't? (I ask this as an American Jew btw)
The Palestinians themselves are largely choosing not to. When Israel was formed, they rejected the partition in hopes of their Arab neighbors destroying Israel and just getting it all anyway. That... didnтАЩt work out for them.
And even today, even the most peaceful Palestinian leaders still annually commemorate IsraelтАЩs founding as a disaster, and will not accept any peace terms that do not include a тАЬright of return.тАЭ Whereas Hamas overtly calls for IsraelтАЩs destruction, even Fatah still demands that all descendants of 1948 refugees be permitted to return to Israel, which would still end Israel as a Jewish state even in the unlikely event that it did not involve actual ethnic cleansing.
Not surprisingly, Israel will never peacefully allow this. But the Palestinians are, in effect, unwilling to accept just the occupied territories. And so, they are stateless.
I never said Palestinians don't deserve statehood. I would be happy with a two-state solution, a Palestinian state and Israel, side by side, both peaceful and prosperous and, perhaps not friendly toward each other, but at least recognizing each other's right to exist. But I can't want it more than they do.
"But I can't want it more than they do." Exactly. Until Palestinians reject Hamas, they will never be in a position to "want it." The same could be said of Israeli citizens voting in politicians who refuse to end West Bank settlements. Israel should be preserving the West Bank as a bargaining chip for Palestinian statehood should the Palestinians ever come to a place where they're willing to get rid of Hamas. But neither side is doing what it needs to do, so this never really ends until they do.
Exactly.
This is the problem with the rewind-things-to-a-point-I-like game. You can always adjust the rewind point to make your position look better.
ItтАЩs been illuminating watching the sorting into the extreme camps on this. Because the position you described is where I am but a solution to the conflict when you are in that position seems impossible to achieve. ItтАЩs almost like if you are in one of the extreme camps, as detestable as your solution might be, at least you can articulate it.
That is because there IS no solution to the conflict in the center.
One of the weaknesses of the center and of being reasonable and rational (at least in comparison to the extremes) is that it takes a lot of work to do things. It takes work to develop and implement solutions. It takes a lot of diplomacy and cajoling.
It is flat out hard. It only looks easy from a distance. What makes it hard is overcoming the negative aspects of human nature and groupthink.
And an extremist can blow ALL of that up in a second with a bomb or well placed bullet or sometimes just with some stupid words.
The current House fiasco is a pointed exemplar of this whole mechanic, in a less openly violent (for now) setting.
The extremist solutions aren't solutions, either--but they can pass for one in a very dim light amidst the anger and angst and fear and hatred of the situation. These "solutions" appeal to the inner animal.
This shit has been going on for three-quarters of a century or so. It has become a self-renewing and sustaining cycle. It has a life of its own, despite the best intentions of many and because of the worst intentions of a few.
But that is all it often takes, the worst intentions of a few.
ItтАЩs been going on a lot longer than that. And until humanity stops killing itself over which Bronze Age book and which imaginary sky daddy is real, it will continue.
тАЬAny jackass can knock down a barn, but it takes a skilled carpenter to build oneтАЭ - quoted by Steven Pinker
Unfortunately, obviously, the MAGAs in our midst seem to have that one twisted; they seem to think theyтАЩre heroic and powerful by destroying things. ThatтАЩs the danger of small minded people who feel powerless; they feel powerless because someone (eg Trump) is telling them that.
Destroying gives immediate satisfaction. ItтАЩs a quick high.
Good point. As a culture, we are notably deficient in delayed gratification.
Exactly
This isnтАЩt just true for Israel, itтАЩs true for every difficult problem, such a global warming, immigration, and the huge gap in wealth and power all around the world. We can see from the current Republican Party that following extremists, especially foolish and incompetent ones, leads to chaos and total dysfunction. Trump and Netanyahu are both frauds and narcissists who never had the ability to deliver on their promises. Netanyahu promised peace and security, but delivered weakness. I still donтАЩt know what Trump promised, except to make himself king. ThatтАЩs why the Republicans canтАЩt decide on anything. They canтАЩt agree about what they want to accomplish. They each have a crazy pet peeve: ban books, delete history, oppose gay people, fight for fetuses, destroy the armed forces, cut social security, take money from the poor and give to the rich. They have some idea that the vast majority of Americans are against all of those things so they respond by blowing up the government.
As income inequality rises, so too does white grievance. It seems relevant to the various points of societal turmoil you describe.
The more horrible your situation is (and the more powerless you see yourself as being able to change it) the more likely you are to divert (or be diverted) into cultural issues that you feel strongly about that you believe yo CAN change.
And the people currently benefitting n the power structure are glad to facilitate that as long as it doesn't look like it will hurt them.
Also, it is far easier for any given тАЬweтАЭ to say what тАЬweтАЭ are against than what тАЬweтАЭwant, because it only makes sense to be against things as they are (or can be parodied that way). It is easy and profitable to specify grievances, and it requires no responsibility for imagining or articulating what тАЬweтАЭ would do differently (see: Obamacare). It is impossible to govern if government itself is тАЬthe problemтАЭ underlying every grievance.
Powerless people are easily manipulated. In the case of Trump and his cult, he had to carefully nurture their feelings of powerlessness, because in reality their lives are pretty fine, relatively speaking.
Rush Limbaugh and Faux News working on behalf of Republican billionaires had that ball rolling decades ago. They stimulated resentments against the "others" and the "elites" so they could hoodwink citizens to vote against their own economic interests. Trump was the first to realize that their resentments could be turned against the very people who had instigated and nurtured them in the 1st place.
"Trump was the first to realize that their resentments could be turned against the very people who had instigated and nurtured them in the 1st place."
Bingo!
"It is flat out hard. It only looks easy from a distance. What makes it hard is overcoming the negative aspects of human nature and groupthink."
This implies the center isn't the preferred haven for groupthink and complacency. In the instance of 10/7 the center seems to actually be energized to provide a solution for once while the right and left are throwing bombs. More often in recent times that is not the case. If the Republicans are the party of "no" then the center is the party of "can't" or at least "I can't be bothered."
While part of me thinks it is great the center is leading the charge because a long term and sustainable push to improve the situation might materialize for once, another part of me is extremely bitter that they can't be bothered on anything else. Does it literally take decapitating infants on livestreams to move the needle? Then the final, hopeless part of me remembers that it is still recent and the bill hasn't come due yet. We'll see how much appetite this holier than thou center has to make this happen come election day next year or even when hashing out the budget next month (if there is even a functioning Congress in place to do it).
I canтАЩt accept that the extreme anti-Israel contingent, complete with hang gliders on a poster, is the voice of the anything to do with тАЬthe leftтАЭ. I think itтАЩs the voice of the void between the ends of the horseshoe. Certainly, it could be where the anti-Semitism of the right overlaps the anti-Israeli views of what is being called the тАЬextreme leftтАЭ. I have never felt sympathetic to what some regard as the тАЬclassicтАЭ extreme left of the Marxist-Leninists.
IтАЩve always thought of myself as championing the left as generally defined as compassion and basic human kindness, of income distribution to achieve a more just society. How does social democracy devolve into cheering on the baby killers? If you take a horseshoe and extend the lines you get half of an infinity sign.
It takes the situation getting so bad that something has to be done. Otherwise people will just suck it up, complain, and grind through their days.
Autocrats and oligarchs count on that. You can let things get bad and corrupt and oppressive so long as they don't get TOO bad, corrupt or oppressive... and if you turn the screws slowly enough, it can get pretty bad before the break point comes.
One of the realities is that the people will often turn on each other before they turn on the shitheads that are actually the problem.
Actually, the тАЬshitheadsтАЭ are the symptoms of the problem in D.C. The problem is a voter base untethered from reality who vote the shitheads into office. Our MAGA neighbors are responsible.
There is a shared responsibility here.
People do vote this shitheads into office, but there are a lot of things going on that facilitate the shitheads being in position to get elected (and having the money and media support to get noticed and elected)... and who the particular shitheads are.
What most of these politicians don't realize is that they are easily replaceable. There are hundreds or thousands of people JUST LIKE THEM out there that would be able to fill their shoes, provided they get the necessary visibility and support.
This used to be provided by the GoP as an institution. Now a lot of it comes from the media and PACs.
Mostly agree. The media that makes MAGA voters possible is the large and profitable dis-information industry.
It is this weird, almost incestuous cycle that just spins around and around and gets worse. It is kind of like dealing/using drugs.
It escalates because the dose that used to get you high no longer does.
I agree with all this, but I'll add a caveat from personal experience:
A harsh Sunni-Shia civil war broke out during the years I got sent to Iraq (the civil war lasted from approximately early '06 until early '08). The sectarian violence that ensued was far worse for Iraqi civilians than what AQI was doing to the Iraqi government forces and US forces combined. The Sunni/Shia militias went after the other side's civilians almost exclusively (they also went after US troops and the Iraqi army/police, but they primarily went after their domestic opponents). There were something like 160,000+ civilians that died during the Iraq war, and the bulk of them were during this sectarian violence that occurred between Sunni and Shia for about 2 years--a prelude to what would happen later under ISIS after the Syrian civil war gave it room to grow and spill over the border in 2013. The thing is, sometime around late '07/early '08, the Sunni populace of Iraq turned on AQI. They had enough of their people dying at the hands of Shia militias and Iraqi/US forces (sometimes the Shia militias *were* the Iraqi police btw), and they turned on AQI and stopped supporting them. I sometimes wonder if something like this could happen between the Palestinian populace and Hamas, and if it could, perhaps this is the kind of thing that would turn the conflict and give way to something like a foreseeable end state where it's not Palestinian militants being in charge of the populace and allow real negotiations on a 2-state solution taking place. I just don't know how easy it would be for us to get there considering how much popular support Hamas (and Fatah in the WB) enjoy from the Palestinian populace. That said, I would have thought the same in 2006 regarding Sunni public support for AQI, so who knows what is possible in the future.
I have read recently that West Bank Palestinians have grown increasingly disenchanted with feckless Fatah and its blatant corruption. Hamas is making inroads there with its extremist appeals, but they are just as corrupt, stealing humanitarian aid meant for civilians and using it for terrorism.
Fuck both Hamas and Fatah. Things will change for the Palestinians when the Palestinian men get tired of bootlicking these grifters and decide to start killing them or diming them out to the IDF instead. Doesn't even have to be most Palestinian men willing to do this, just enough of them.
Historical experience tells me that this is possible. That historical experience also tells me that it doesn't happen until things break down to a certain point. The actual locus of that point is a contingent factor (how much is the normal population willing and able to put up with before it acts).
One of our big problems is that the system (whatever that system is) tends to work hard to project/create a sense of normalcy. The media with its both-siderism and pursuit of profit (and its increased atomization). The political parties playing at business as usual. The sullen acceptance of the "regular" people because that is what they )think) they are stuck with--and things aren't So bad after all, right?
It is less, I think, complacency than it is a fear of making things worse. The fear of making things worse (or of change per se) holds things in place until things get bad enough that people are willing to take the chance.
People can only affect change through either through cultural change over time or by spasms of activity (usually in th4e form of violence).
It seems clear that there is no hope for improvement until Hamas is replaced by a leadership that is serious about wanting a diplomatic settlement.
Don't hold your breath, everyone.
It is going to require the mass of Palestinians to repudiate what is currently their "leadership" structure (both HAMAs and the Palestinian Authority).
Yup. That's what I was thinking. I'm inclined to think I will never see that day. But maybe I'm just a pessimist.
тАЬ It is less, I think, complacency than it is a fear of making things worse. The fear of making things worse (or of change per se) holds things in place until things get bad enough that people are willing to take the chance.тАЭ
This is a moment among many when I feel that international examples of violence recapitulates domestic violence in families. (I probably have that inverted; domestic violence recapitulates international violence). The same psychological forces are in play.
You're right that that "breaking point" has to happen before a population turns on their militant overlords, and maybe that will or won't happen in our lifetimes. But it IS possible. A counter-point to what I said is that the Sunni-Shia civil war was young when the Sunnis turned their back on AQI, whereas the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has gone on for a very long time and has become embedded in the culture on both sides. That's a whole lot of generational momentum to overcome that wasn't present in Iraq necessarily--albeit, the Shia had suffered under Sunni autocratic rule since 1963--so this isn't necessarily apples to oranges.
It's kind of like William T Sherman's outlook on protracted warfare: тАЬWar is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.тАЭ I think he was talking about the necessity for a "breaking point" to end warfare, and that cruelty and overwhelming suffering is what is often necessary to bring that "breaking point" about. That's why he burned down the South. The story of Imperial Japan tells a similar story when it came to defeating their own religious martyrdom culture after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sometimes a peoples need to look cultural and societal extinction in the eye before collectively throwing in the towel.
Some key things that need to be understood:
When I use the phrases: there is no solution or a solution is not possible; it doesn't mean that there aren't solutions.
Indeed, solutions can usually be identified or are actually know/recognized.
A solution is not possible because there isn't sufficient motivation for the necessary CHANGE. The existing cultural/political inertia cannot be overcome.
It cannot be overcome because existing conditions are not bad enough to drive change. People are getting by. There is not a strong enough perception (because it is often a matter of perception) to drive change.
This is why we are continually kicking the can down the road. People are unwilling to change the existing state, so issues are ignored or short term "solutions" are applied. Reference the various "compromises" that occurred in the lead up to the Civil War.
Things actually have to get pretty bad to drive change. That badness has to be immediate and clear. But (again) realize that this is a function of PERCEPTION.
The perception of threat to the institution of slavery by the Southern master class (and the essential nature of that institution) were enough to precipitate a crisis.
Except their action led to the swift demise of what they sought to preserve.
By the same token, the efforts to preserve racism and sexism in the US may well precipitate the crisis that effectively ends them as they currently exist.
A substantive number of people are absolutely resistant to change. Change is dangerous--and better the danger and discomfort that you know, than the unknown danger and discomfort that might arise. Even people who will ultimately benefit from change will tend to resist it.
Better the devil you know.
This makes it VERY difficult to proactively change things to stop the bad. The bad must, in essence, happen for the change to happen.
An autocratic system can force/coerce change (but not always successfully and not always in a functional direction). A democratic system usually cannot until the crisis point is reached.
One can see history as a series of crises that drive change. Think of it as evolutionary pressure, shifts in environment that are either adapted to or that cause extinction.
And, because we often do not change until a crisis hits, the change is not managed well. It turns into something akin to a crapshoot. You never know where you will end up (which only contributes further to a fear and avoidance of change).
This is another really well put thread. You have been on fire lately. Well done
Fair point
You are correct, for the moment. Emotions are incredibly high right now, deservedly so. And the biggest challenge for people is to be able to share the emotions and distress without going to an extreme, point-of-very-hard-to-return-from place.
тАЬWar is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.тАЭ - William Tecumseh Sherman
I am not sure Israel COULD do it, even if they were "allowed."
Because it will involve the deaths of thousands of innocent people. ThatтАЩs not a significant ask to make.
You don't win a game of whack-a-mole by refusing to whack the moles just because they keep moving from hole to hole or hiding among the non-moles either. This is the essence of the conundrum for Israel.
As I've said here elsewhere, this conflict only ends when the Palestinian people start killing Hamas instead of licking their boots. If they can insurgency against the better-armed IDF, they can insurgency against Hamas too. In fact, they live in the same neighborhood as Hamas and know where they sleep at night, so it's a lot easier to kill Hamas terrorists than it is to kill IDF soldiers.
"If they can insurgency against the better-armed IDF, they can insurgency against Hamas too. In fact, they live in the same neighborhood as Hamas and know where they sleep at night, so it's a lot easier to kill Hamas terrorists than it is to kill IDF soldiers."
I agree with the need to whack the moles. But it wasn't members of the general populace that took on the IDF. It's a lot to expect that the Palestinian populace will rise up en masse to take on Hamas. As both you and Mercer have pointed out things have to get pretty bad before reaching the breaking point.
Maybe the Israeli response will be enough to force that this time. But I wouldn't count on it, as I am sure that you aren't.
The problem is that like the Sunni-Shia Civil War you address above it will lead to civilians on either side murdering each other.
Civilians would be murdering Hamas members, who are not civilians, but Hamas would be murdering civilians to protect itself from the civilians rising up against them. If the Palestinian civilians are already dying from IDF counter-attacks, why not die killing Hamas terrorists instead? Because at least when Hamas dies off the IDF bombs stop. If they keep fighting the IDF in the name of Hamas, the IDF counter-attacks never stop and peace never becomes possible. That's the game theory approach. The Palestinian civilians are dying either way, so why not die fighting against Hamas terrorists until they are finished off (a lot easier than finishing off the IDF) and then there can be a peace worked out from there with potential statehood at the end of the tunnel. The solution is pretty fucking simple to me (as a non-Palestinian) and the Sunnis abandoning AQI to end the Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq (and the insurgency campaign against the US/Iraqi government) is a great example. Had the Sunnis and Shia just kept killing each other there wouldn't have been five years of relative peace until ISIS came over the border in 2013. In fact, a protracted Sunni-Shia civil war would have given ISIS a lot more shelter in Iraq had it still been going on in 2013.
Although I understand your reasoning it seems to me it would just devolve into civil war in Gaza and I'm not sure which side would win. Hamas is surely better armed and organized. That would give them the edge.
ItтАЩs like the crusading Jesuits rationalizing that itтАЩs okay to kill you in an effort to save your souls by conversion to Christianity because if I didnтАЩt even try, your soul is damned anyway so it doesnтАЩt matter. ItтАЩs ratiocination run amok.
If you refuse to whack the moles because you're afraid of accidently whacking non-moles, then you'll never beat the moles.
The non-moles have a vote here too. They're not getting the moles out of their neighborhood on their own accord. If the men of Palestine can find the courage to fight an insurgency against a much better armed IDF, they can find the courage to kick Hamas out of their neighborhood with violence. It is because they are too timid and loyal to Hamas that the moles living among them (Hamas terrorists) keep getting whacked by the anti-moles (Israel), with high levels of non-moles (Palestinian civilians) getting hit as an unintended consequence. If Palestinians kick out Hamas, the bombs stop falling in their neighborhood and a real peace solution becomes a possibility. The problem is that there are too many Palestinian men licking Hamas' boots instead of killing them.
This is not a very different sentiment from shooting tue hostage to shoot the hostage taker.
Just imagine that the hostage taker is inside of your house and shooting wildly at everyone else inside while holding the hostage and it'll make more sense. In the scenario you're thinking about, the hostage taker only poses a threat to the hostage and not to the police and other civilians around them.
No, your scenario still entails shooting the hostage. I mean, if you want to kill the hostage in an attempt to save other hostages, then say so. Because again, there are one million child hostages and washing your hands of their potential deaths isnтАЩt the civilized thing either.
I've been balls deep in a counter-insurgency campaign and an Iraqi civil war. I speak to this stuff from experience. When the Sunnis in Iraq abandoned Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni-Shia civil war stopped and so did the insurgency campaign against the US and Iraqi government. This shit in Israel only stops when the Palestinians are willing to kick out Hamas the way Iraqi Sunnis kicked out AQI there. Until then, a terrorist group remains in control of a place that will never become an independent nation so long as said terrorist group (Hamas) remains in power over them with no Palestinian military group challenging them for power so they can negotiate a 2-state solution in good faith.
That's why it'd be a lot easier for Palestinians to get rid of Hamas instead of Israel. The Palestinians know which families are Hamas because they live in the same communities and know the factions. This conflict ends when the Palestinians decide that they've had enough of their militant overlords and start killing them off instead of licking their boots (or sandals).
How strongly is the general Palestinian population bound to Hamas by a shared hatred of the Jews? It might take a truly existential threat to break that. By which I mean mass, mass casualties.
"agreed..but i cant see Palestinians wishing this whilst dodging israeli bombs."
I could have said the same thing about the Iraqi Sunni turning on AQI while in the middle of a Sunni-Shia civil war and an active insurgency against the US military and Iraqi government, but they did, and it ended both the Sunni-Shia civil war and the insurgency campaign against the US & Iraqi government. Shit is possible, it just takes a real breaking point and a willing partner to help get the counter-Hamas insurgency off the ground (funding and arms from the Israeli government to anti-Hamas Palestinians groups in Gaza willing to negotiate a 2-state solution with the Israeli gov once Hamas is gone).
I am appalled by Hamas, including their taking of hostages. But what are "human shields" but hostages? Why is it OK to kill one but not the other?
Some people are going on about how it's OK because the Palestinians elected Hamas. So I checked. In 2006 Hamas got 44.45% of the vote; Fatah got 41.43%. Shortly thereafter, violence between Hamas and Fatah resulted in Fatah being thrown out and Hamas taking over. Kinda like what happens under many an authoritarian governments. One can only assume that 41.43% of Gazan voters were at least mildly pissed.
Then came the blockade of Gaza in 2007, which has been going on for 14 years. The socioeconomic effect on Gaza has been profound. It seems plausible that more Gazans support Hamas than once did. But it also seems plausible that citizens of ANY country who suffered a similar blockade because their government was authoritarian, even violent against the blockading country, would develop a sense of unity against the blockader. Even then, before the recent events, the a survey of Gazans who "supported" Hamas was at 68%, whatever "support" means. At that point, 32% were not in support DESPITE the blockade. But that 32% is being bombed and denied electricity and water just as much as the rest.
It is difficult to come up with a comparable situation elsewhere in the world, though treatment of the Kurds comes to mind, or the Armenians in whichever -Stan it is that expelled them recently. At least the Armenians were allowed to leave the country.
I hate the utter hypocrisy of so many of the GOP leaders. I am supposed to support the hypocrisy of Israel "warning" Palestinians to leave when there is no place to go? Has Israel made any attempt to find a place where evacuees could go, with the idea of a return once Hamas is obliterated? Even if it is just women and children? If they have, I'd like to hear of it. But the plight of refugees trying to escape to European countries bodes ill for finding such a place. Egypt doesn't want refugees, much as the US doesn't at the Mexican border. Would the US take women and children from Gaza? Excuse me while I choke.
And assuming the age to vote then was 18 no one under 35 voted for Hamas then.
you are right. My idiot online calculator was stuck in 2021
Powerful medicine your prescribing as all, go from being faux thinkers to actual thinkers.
This is really well put. I am kind of sick of these people who point out the crazies on the left as a strawman for the entire left. If you look at congress democrats itтАЩs literally 256 out of like 261 who donтАЩt absolutely support Israel. Finding people with no power that say stupid shit is easy. FFS, Biden probably gave the most pro-Israel speech in history and these writers are pointing out Harvard student groups. Who cares.
Similar to "Abolish ICE" and "Defund the Police."
Sorry, not the same as Hamas directly torturing children with their own hands.
I donтАЩt think one is тАЬbetterтАЭ. IтАЩm saying they are different, and the difference is in the perpetrators. IтАЩm struggling with it, but I know that torturing someone to death in front of your own eyes is a higher order crime that requires an irredeemable very darkness of the soul.
Yes I worry about that. But Israel is giving warnings ahead of their actions - insufficient, maybe, but a world apart from what they suffered.
I found the most ethical understanding in this piece in the NYT, by an Israeli officer, and in the comments that followed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/opinion/israel-military-war.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Terror in uniform, approved all the way down the command structure.
We will have to agree to disagree. IтАЩm still finding my way through all this, but I still maintain thereтАЩs a difference in the level of depravity.
Thanks for the link. It speaks what many feel. May the thought become the voice of the people.
The Republican Chaos caucus is in charge. Student organizations are not.