My post on the Israel-Palestine affair was the most widely-read thing I ever wrote; not something I anticipated from what was originally intended to be a learning exercise for myself. I’ve been meaning to address some of the thoughtful feedback I received but
>The calls for an Israeli ceasefire are directly implicated by this question. I’ve repeatedly asked and desperately searched for any suggestions for how Israel should conduct its war differently, and it’s near-impossible to get a straight answer because so many ceasefire advocates outright reject the premise that Israel has any justifiable objectives whatsoever.
I've had variants on this argument several times in the past few weeks. People will confidently state that Israel is being too aggressive in its retaliation to October 7th. I'll ask them, what should Israel do instead? "I don't know, but not this." My mother says "I'm not a pacifist, I know you have to respond with force sometimes, but this is too much." I ask her, what should Israel do instead? "I don't know, but not this." My brother explicitly told me that Israel's military action in Gaza is genocidal, which just strikes me as absurd.
I get the distinct impression that anything Israel does is seen as intrinsically wrong. They drop bombs on Gaza with the goal of killing Hamas operatives, which has the inevitable byproduct of killing civilians as collateral damage. People cluck their tongues and say that they should have gone after Hamas operatives in surgical strikes rather than killing civilians. Mind you, every time Israel has assassinated a known Hamas operative in the last 20-30 years, westerners were outraged.
The security checkpoints also came up in a debate with my mum. She told me how my grandad visited Israel in the early 2000s and described being appalled by how humiliating the checkpoints and physical searches were for the Palestinians. I pointed out that Palestine were already using child suicide bombers, and doesn't that factor into the risk calculus at all? No, apparently not for whatever reason.
I find it somewhat telling when people (correctly) point out that Israel is an ethnostate, while eliding the fact that Palastine is *also* an ethnostate. They're both ethnostates! This is a fundamentally ethno-religious dispute about which historical group of similar people is the "rightful owner" of the land, and both factions have very similar motivations.
Haven’t finished this yet, but that alternate wording “Palestine is Arab” reminded me of one of my favorite sayings, that the past is a different country. You don’t live there anymore.
But for this sort of situation I might go further: the past is Austria-Hungary or the Confederate States of America. No one lives there anymore.
There’s a bit in the cheesy but glorious Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven, where Orlando Bloom’s character addresses the defenders of Jerusalem, saying that no one now living had been born when Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders, that the besieged had not been alive to give offense to the besiegers, who had not been alive to be offended, and who all might never have given a thought to even older peoples they had displaced, such as the Jews or Aramaic Christians. He concludes, naturally for Scott, with the classic 2005 normie liberal sentiment that no one and everyone has claim to the city and the Holy Land, which is true up to a point but not at all helpful.
Of course, with modern medicine, the precise statement about the living and the dead is not true in the present. But the sheer inability to live in reality that I perceive from both the Palestinians (though this may be changing as Israeli resolve shows no sign of weakening) and their dilettantish Western defenders is not only infuriating to me personally but probably their greatest vulnerability going forward.
We all must live in reality. There can, in the long run anyway, be no exceptions.
“ Israel meanwhile, as a country explicitly founded as a refuge for Jews from across the world, would be unwilling to absorb the voter demographic shock.”
I don’t think this (maintaining Israel as an ethnostate) is the only concern of Israelis. Absorbing the current Palestinians wouldn’t be merely converting Israel from an explicitly Jewish state to a modern multiethnic democracy, it would, in all likelihood, be consigning Israel to being an Islamic authoritarian state. I think you could get a lot of Israelis on board with being France. Being Iran, not so much.
Hamas quite notably took the “one man, one vote, one time” approach after the Gazan election, going to war against the losing Fatah party and not holding another election since. Israelis would be crazy to ignore the risk of exactly that happening again if the current, highly radicalized Palestinians were just straight up given a vote for the Knesset.
At this point the only path forward with any chance of success imo is if the US, EU, and surrounding Arab nations jointly decide to demilitarize and administer a temporary Palestinian state long enough to deradicalize the populace, akin to the occupation of Japan and Germany in the post WW2 period.
Of course, this would never happen and there’s no political will to do it, but boy would it be nice if we could
It’s interesting that you bring up both Freddie deBoer, which I assume you like for his critique of Wokism, and Inverse Florida. By the excellent definition of Inverse Florida, Freddie is exactly that type of leftist who should be read with a lot of suspicion on the topic of Israel. The man tweeted and published endless denials of a Hamas atrocity, blathered about there being no proof, threw a giant fit about how he’s closing comments in 2024 because of people daring to remind him about Hamas killing babies and raping girls and women, and in general steered debate again and again from the problematic existence of Hamas to his “evils of Israel”:
I have never understood the complaint about ethnostates. Basically all of Europe is composed of ethnostates to one degree or the other, and almost all conflicts WITHIN Europe derive from different ethnicities fighting over resources. In the UK the Scots, Welsh and English bicker politically with the numerically powerful English almost always winning. France has some smaller ethnic communities but its basically a large ethnostate (with a Muslim minority which causes friction). Spain is also an ethnostate, but has many minorities, and each of them complains loudly about their rights, most notably the Catalan people around Barcelona.
Nobody cares that these places are ethnostates, why should I care that Israel is one? I'd argue all of its neighbors are ethnostates too; non-ethnostates are the exception, not the rule.
A fun overview of some of the historical gods of the area, and how they have come and gone, can be found in James Michener's novel "The Source." (If you're unfamiliar with Michener he writes historical fiction that attempts to go from the very beginning to the time he's writing it.) It also has the curious perspective of being published in 1965, meaning it was written in the atmosphere that eventually gave birth to the short-lived legal equality of 1966-67. The book closes with some "this place is really going to be something once the Israel/Arab relationship settles down" stuff that is hilariously grim in retrospect.
I'd love to be wrong, but it's difficult to see any real resolution to this conflict without either (1) world opinion and especially Middle East/Muslim opinion on Israel and Jews changing dramatically and unexpectedly or (2) Israel achieving such a total, crushing victory over Hamas that it establishes a kind of deterrence that even its fanatical enemies recognize for a long time to come. The fact is that the international community has consistently prevented this decades long conflict from being decisively resolved time and time again, to the detriment of everyone involved.
At the end of the day, the scenario people don't want to talk about is that unless those living in Gaza and the West Bank are permanently relocated to neighboring Arab countries, there will never be peace.
I also read something today (not sure how true it is) that the Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia and UAE asked Abbas to step down and elect a governing body for the PA that would be approved by them. Would that piss of Iran too much? 🤷♀️
I don't know if it makes sense to respond this much time after the post appeared, but I just read it now. I would like to point out that your description of the tragic case of the 13 year old Iman Darweesh is the version of events of the prosecution. The officer in question was acquitted precisely because the court rejected this version of the events! The commander in question was vindicated again in a civil defamation trial, so this is not just a matter of military (in)justice.
Not having read much of either of your posts -- though they're bookmarked for later perusal -- but having read about many of the points you've raised yourself, one might reasonably tender a relevant quote -- from Wikipedia 😉🙂:
"Kill them all. Let Gawd sort them out" -- or variations thereof. More particularly, the Latin & less pithy translation:
"Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
Kill them. The Lord knows those that are his own."
>The calls for an Israeli ceasefire are directly implicated by this question. I’ve repeatedly asked and desperately searched for any suggestions for how Israel should conduct its war differently, and it’s near-impossible to get a straight answer because so many ceasefire advocates outright reject the premise that Israel has any justifiable objectives whatsoever.
I've had variants on this argument several times in the past few weeks. People will confidently state that Israel is being too aggressive in its retaliation to October 7th. I'll ask them, what should Israel do instead? "I don't know, but not this." My mother says "I'm not a pacifist, I know you have to respond with force sometimes, but this is too much." I ask her, what should Israel do instead? "I don't know, but not this." My brother explicitly told me that Israel's military action in Gaza is genocidal, which just strikes me as absurd.
I get the distinct impression that anything Israel does is seen as intrinsically wrong. They drop bombs on Gaza with the goal of killing Hamas operatives, which has the inevitable byproduct of killing civilians as collateral damage. People cluck their tongues and say that they should have gone after Hamas operatives in surgical strikes rather than killing civilians. Mind you, every time Israel has assassinated a known Hamas operative in the last 20-30 years, westerners were outraged.
The security checkpoints also came up in a debate with my mum. She told me how my grandad visited Israel in the early 2000s and described being appalled by how humiliating the checkpoints and physical searches were for the Palestinians. I pointed out that Palestine were already using child suicide bombers, and doesn't that factor into the risk calculus at all? No, apparently not for whatever reason.
I find it somewhat telling when people (correctly) point out that Israel is an ethnostate, while eliding the fact that Palastine is *also* an ethnostate. They're both ethnostates! This is a fundamentally ethno-religious dispute about which historical group of similar people is the "rightful owner" of the land, and both factions have very similar motivations.
Haven’t finished this yet, but that alternate wording “Palestine is Arab” reminded me of one of my favorite sayings, that the past is a different country. You don’t live there anymore.
But for this sort of situation I might go further: the past is Austria-Hungary or the Confederate States of America. No one lives there anymore.
There’s a bit in the cheesy but glorious Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven, where Orlando Bloom’s character addresses the defenders of Jerusalem, saying that no one now living had been born when Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders, that the besieged had not been alive to give offense to the besiegers, who had not been alive to be offended, and who all might never have given a thought to even older peoples they had displaced, such as the Jews or Aramaic Christians. He concludes, naturally for Scott, with the classic 2005 normie liberal sentiment that no one and everyone has claim to the city and the Holy Land, which is true up to a point but not at all helpful.
Of course, with modern medicine, the precise statement about the living and the dead is not true in the present. But the sheer inability to live in reality that I perceive from both the Palestinians (though this may be changing as Israeli resolve shows no sign of weakening) and their dilettantish Western defenders is not only infuriating to me personally but probably their greatest vulnerability going forward.
We all must live in reality. There can, in the long run anyway, be no exceptions.
“ Israel meanwhile, as a country explicitly founded as a refuge for Jews from across the world, would be unwilling to absorb the voter demographic shock.”
I don’t think this (maintaining Israel as an ethnostate) is the only concern of Israelis. Absorbing the current Palestinians wouldn’t be merely converting Israel from an explicitly Jewish state to a modern multiethnic democracy, it would, in all likelihood, be consigning Israel to being an Islamic authoritarian state. I think you could get a lot of Israelis on board with being France. Being Iran, not so much.
Hamas quite notably took the “one man, one vote, one time” approach after the Gazan election, going to war against the losing Fatah party and not holding another election since. Israelis would be crazy to ignore the risk of exactly that happening again if the current, highly radicalized Palestinians were just straight up given a vote for the Knesset.
At this point the only path forward with any chance of success imo is if the US, EU, and surrounding Arab nations jointly decide to demilitarize and administer a temporary Palestinian state long enough to deradicalize the populace, akin to the occupation of Japan and Germany in the post WW2 period.
Of course, this would never happen and there’s no political will to do it, but boy would it be nice if we could
It’s interesting that you bring up both Freddie deBoer, which I assume you like for his critique of Wokism, and Inverse Florida. By the excellent definition of Inverse Florida, Freddie is exactly that type of leftist who should be read with a lot of suspicion on the topic of Israel. The man tweeted and published endless denials of a Hamas atrocity, blathered about there being no proof, threw a giant fit about how he’s closing comments in 2024 because of people daring to remind him about Hamas killing babies and raping girls and women, and in general steered debate again and again from the problematic existence of Hamas to his “evils of Israel”:
I have never understood the complaint about ethnostates. Basically all of Europe is composed of ethnostates to one degree or the other, and almost all conflicts WITHIN Europe derive from different ethnicities fighting over resources. In the UK the Scots, Welsh and English bicker politically with the numerically powerful English almost always winning. France has some smaller ethnic communities but its basically a large ethnostate (with a Muslim minority which causes friction). Spain is also an ethnostate, but has many minorities, and each of them complains loudly about their rights, most notably the Catalan people around Barcelona.
Nobody cares that these places are ethnostates, why should I care that Israel is one? I'd argue all of its neighbors are ethnostates too; non-ethnostates are the exception, not the rule.
A fun overview of some of the historical gods of the area, and how they have come and gone, can be found in James Michener's novel "The Source." (If you're unfamiliar with Michener he writes historical fiction that attempts to go from the very beginning to the time he's writing it.) It also has the curious perspective of being published in 1965, meaning it was written in the atmosphere that eventually gave birth to the short-lived legal equality of 1966-67. The book closes with some "this place is really going to be something once the Israel/Arab relationship settles down" stuff that is hilariously grim in retrospect.
I'd love to be wrong, but it's difficult to see any real resolution to this conflict without either (1) world opinion and especially Middle East/Muslim opinion on Israel and Jews changing dramatically and unexpectedly or (2) Israel achieving such a total, crushing victory over Hamas that it establishes a kind of deterrence that even its fanatical enemies recognize for a long time to come. The fact is that the international community has consistently prevented this decades long conflict from being decisively resolved time and time again, to the detriment of everyone involved.
At the end of the day, the scenario people don't want to talk about is that unless those living in Gaza and the West Bank are permanently relocated to neighboring Arab countries, there will never be peace.
This is an Arab-Israeli news anchor expressing her solidarity with this fight:
https://www.instagram.com/tv/C1QQETKAN2a/?igsh=azd0ZGl5MjI5d2J2
I also read something today (not sure how true it is) that the Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia and UAE asked Abbas to step down and elect a governing body for the PA that would be approved by them. Would that piss of Iran too much? 🤷♀️
I don't know if it makes sense to respond this much time after the post appeared, but I just read it now. I would like to point out that your description of the tragic case of the 13 year old Iman Darweesh is the version of events of the prosecution. The officer in question was acquitted precisely because the court rejected this version of the events! The commander in question was vindicated again in a civil defamation trial, so this is not just a matter of military (in)justice.
Not having read much of either of your posts -- though they're bookmarked for later perusal -- but having read about many of the points you've raised yourself, one might reasonably tender a relevant quote -- from Wikipedia 😉🙂:
"Kill them all. Let Gawd sort them out" -- or variations thereof. More particularly, the Latin & less pithy translation:
"Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
Kill them. The Lord knows those that are his own."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caedite_eos._Novit_enim_Dominus_qui_sunt_eius.
Pretty much the same sentiment as Shakespeare's "a pox on both their houses".