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 Hamas’ rhetoric framing Is…
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 Hamas’ 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 I’m 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 you’re not going to believe this, but those folks were someone done with the idea of other people telling them they didn’t 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 “the Crusades” 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 wasn’t 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 they’d 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 others’ terms. After the wars that immediately followed, both Israel and their neighbors expelled millions of Jews and Muslims, which each settled in the others’ territory. The vast majority of modern Israelis are as much the descendants of recent refugees as the Palestinians who haven’t 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 Palestinians’ 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 don’t 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 that’s been the case for population shifts for centuries. Whenever I see them speaking of the “Nakba,” I can only just kind of groan and say “you lost, get over it.” Some time in the next decade or two, the last people with any real memory of that time will be gone; we’re 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 you’re also not 100% wrong in the implication. The Ukrainians may realistically come to a conclusion that they can’t 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 we’re in a place where we think that trend line will be in Ukraine’s favor unless Trump wins the election and pulls the rug out from under them. Russia, in turn, is assuming we won’t have the patience to do so.
That said... if we’re wrong, and Ukraine can’t do this before they run out of disposable bodies? Yes, they’re functionally going to have to make some other deal where they let Russia keep this stuff, but Russia is also forced to accept that what’s left is going straight into NATO, so there will be no further “border edit wars” 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 didn’t exist? The likely answer IMO is “we’re probably already in World War III to get Russia out.” 2. What if Hitler (and most of the major former Allies) had had nukes in 1938, or if he’d waited a decade to make his move until he did? The likely answer is, he probably doesn’t ever invade France and the USSR, but France and Britain probably don’t 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 wasn’t, 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... didn’t work out for them.
And even today, even the most peaceful Palestinian leaders still annually commemorate Israel’s founding as a disaster, and will not accept any peace terms that do not include a “right of return.” Whereas Hamas overtly calls for Israel’s 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.
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 Hamas’ 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 I’m 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 you’re not going to believe this, but those folks were someone done with the idea of other people telling them they didn’t 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 “the Crusades” 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 wasn’t 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 they’d 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 others’ terms. After the wars that immediately followed, both Israel and their neighbors expelled millions of Jews and Muslims, which each settled in the others’ territory. The vast majority of modern Israelis are as much the descendants of recent refugees as the Palestinians who haven’t 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 Palestinians’ 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 don’t 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 that’s been the case for population shifts for centuries. Whenever I see them speaking of the “Nakba,” I can only just kind of groan and say “you lost, get over it.” Some time in the next decade or two, the last people with any real memory of that time will be gone; we’re 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 you’re also not 100% wrong in the implication. The Ukrainians may realistically come to a conclusion that they can’t 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 we’re in a place where we think that trend line will be in Ukraine’s favor unless Trump wins the election and pulls the rug out from under them. Russia, in turn, is assuming we won’t have the patience to do so.
That said... if we’re wrong, and Ukraine can’t do this before they run out of disposable bodies? Yes, they’re functionally going to have to make some other deal where they let Russia keep this stuff, but Russia is also forced to accept that what’s left is going straight into NATO, so there will be no further “border edit wars” 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 didn’t exist? The likely answer IMO is “we’re probably already in World War III to get Russia out.” 2. What if Hitler (and most of the major former Allies) had had nukes in 1938, or if he’d waited a decade to make his move until he did? The likely answer is, he probably doesn’t ever invade France and the USSR, but France and Britain probably don’t 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 wasn’t, 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... didn’t work out for them.
And even today, even the most peaceful Palestinian leaders still annually commemorate Israel’s founding as a disaster, and will not accept any peace terms that do not include a “right of return.” Whereas Hamas overtly calls for Israel’s 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.