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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27721 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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I don't take super strong sides on the conflict. It seems to have been a game of tit for tat that the Palestinians have always kept playing despite being very bad at it.

The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves.

This is not a reasonable summary of events. I'll give a slightly more broken down version from my understanding, if I got something wrong let me know and I'll probably update it:

  1. There were always some Jews in that region
  2. The Jews are having a bad time as minorities basically everywhere they are and recently had an attempt at genocide committed against them so they are anxious to establish a state where they are the majority.
  3. the Ottoman empire needs money so they establish the right of land ownership and a number of Arabs end up living as poor tenants under absentee Arab landlords
  4. Jews buy up ~5% of this land and kick the tenant Arabs off this land (I do think this was a wrong committed but not terribly out of step with the morality of the time) They set up kind of leftist Kibbutzim on this land
  5. The Ottoman empire collapses and Britain takes over the area which is now called Mandatory Palestine which includes bits of modern day Jordan and Syria. The Mandatory system is kind of where Britain rules for a while and after the mandatory period ends they intend to draw up state lines and hand the reins over to whatever state(s) form.
  6. There are some small scale Massacres of jews leading to the jews forming some militia like groups, the largest of which is mostly reasonable but there was at least one smaller militia that did its own massacres.
  7. Tit for Tat escalations continue the brits are pretty unhappy with the whole thing
  8. Mandatory period is supposed to end in 1948 but a single peaceful state doesn't seem like something either the Arabs or Jews of the region are interested in.
  9. 1947 there is a UN plan to establish two states Palestinians don't send representation and deny the legitimacy of the plan.
  10. Israel is declared a state and surrounding Arabs immediately attack.
  11. Israel surprisingly wins the war and takes lands beyond even the 1947 proposed borders, many Arabs are expelled at this point and this is what is referred to as the Nakba.
  12. at the same time as Arabs are being Expelled from Israel the Jews are being expelled from the surrounding Arab nations and mostly going to Israel.
  13. From then to today a pattern repeats of Israel very obviously wishing it could take over the whole region and expel the rest of the Arabs but they never actually need to instigate this because the Arabs in the region reliably attack them and provoke retaliation.

I'm left thinking there isn't a clear "good team" here, the Palestinians did get screwed over but usually in ways where they were at least somewhat to blame. Israel's settlements in the west bank are really ridiculous and should probably be dismantled. It's true that Israel isn't giving Palestinians full autonomy in their region but this is understandable given than Palestinians are nearly constantly lobbing rockets at Israel. Israel seemed, at least before Oct 7th, to be willing to go down a de-escalatory path but the Palestinians Seem totally unwilling to walk that path instead harboring the delusion that they're going to some day expel all the Jews and take all the land.

Given this I will say I do mostly side with the Israelis. They're more western and seem to at least attempt to minimize their atrocities in a way that I don't expect the Palestinians to do. A war where Palestinians were wearing the shoes of the Israelis would be an actual Genocide.

This largely tracks my understanding, although I think the religions involved. For Jews, not only is this a safe harbor, but from the point of view of Jews, this is *The Land”. They believe Israel is a holy place given to them by God himself. For Muslim Palestinians, Al-Aqsa is a holy site in Islam, and Islam in general doesn’t have a place for themselves being ruled over by anyone who isn’t a Muslim. Add in the concept of Jihad, and they’re all in on taking back the land. There’s no way either religion can compromise here. Jews aren’t going to give up their holy land especially given what happened when Jews didn’t have a safe harbor in Israel. Palestinians aren’t giving up because they believe that this is their land that they took over and giving it up would be bad.

I never know what to do with the religious aspects. My feel is that they influence on big picture things like why the zionists picked that area in particular and they have a special part in making Jerusalem hard to make work with partition plans but most of the time when we're evaluating just resolutions it doesn't seem that important because we're analyzing it from a secular lens.

I see this as a blind spot for most of us simply because we are secular and live in a secular culture. To them, religion is a very deep very powerful personal thing. And trying to see this through a secular lens when those involved see it through the lens of religion seems like a mistake. To me, the fact that one person is catholic and another is baptist doesn’t mean much, nor does it mean much to those people. If we’d go back to the time of the reformation, this becomes the most important thing to know about them.

In MENA, religion is not just a sort of interesting thing that is just sort of one of dozens of ideas and hobbies and interests a person might have. It’s important and one of the cardinal things about how that person sees the world. And for that matter it’s a big part of how others see them and they see others.

This largely tracks with my understanding of the history of the region (plus a few new details), except:

Israel surprisingly wins the war and takes lands beyond even the 1947 proposed borders, many Arabs are expelled at this point and this is what is referred to as the Nakba.

My understanding was that the Arabs largely left voluntarily upon request by the surrounding Arab nations, who expected to wreak total destruction on those pesky so-called Israelis (in their opinion), and didn't want them to be in the crossfire. Possibly there was some small-scale local hostility and encouragement, but not anything that could be called a proper expulsion.

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

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

some other examples:

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

deir yassin massacre

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

Israeli new historians, like all intellectual dissidents, use intellectual solidarity with the far enemy (Arabs in this case) as weapons to attack the proximate enemy (the established intellectual/political order of the current moment). Without mass annihilation of dissident intellectuals like what all communist and most fascist regime's did, these new waves ALWAYS cherry pick their data to support their arguments, because destroying the near enemy matters more. Note that Morris himself has recanted from his earlier 'Arabs have always been peaceful victims of my ancestors violence' following the second intifada: perhaps once the far enemy makes its intentions more clear it becomes unwise to continue advancing their cause.

I find it especially disingenuous to presume innocence in Arab intentions. Jewish cruelty has to transformed out of the fog of war, but Arab genocidal intentions are always downplayed. Azzam Pasha gleefully called for the genocide of Israel at 1948, and intellectuals sympathetic to palestine have to morph this somehow into Azzam being a pro peace champion of Palestinians, ignoring that the Arabs started the war and were busy trying establish success to divide up the spoils.

Israel is certainly no virtuous lamb innocent of sin, but the endless attempts to castigate Israel by ascribing unlimited moral virtue to explicitly genocidal Arabs is loathsome even to casual normies. For members of this board who have a few more brain cells than average (108 iq gang rise up!) the Palestinian cause is the meme of the bike guy tripping himself over.

benny morris changed his political views and said "transfer/expulsion is good actually", but he is still willing to call it such.

Why would I listen to him more than to British or American or Australian ‘anticolonialist’ historians who are also fundamentally ideologically motivated to hate civilization.

morris's view is basically the same as yours - Both sides did awful things, which is what happens in wars. The Arabs were the losing side and my view is that if people commit major mistakes in history they pay for them and perhaps that’s how it should work out. The Palestinians should have agreed to a two-state solution.

Generally speaking once a historian/academic/intellectual exposes themselves a reflexive contrarian their opinions can be dismissed on first order principles for being intellectually disingenuous. After a certain point you will always see the same few names pop up as an appeal to intellectual authority, as if their name alone is enough to carry the weight of an argument. Chomsky is the top of my mind for this cadre of notables, but journalists such as Herman and Pilger are thrown about by tankies too. Once these names pop up uncritically as justification for a pet cause, they can be ignored.

Benny and his fellow travelers are postmodernists that sought to subvert how reality itself is understood by spuriously dismissing countervailing evidence as 'biased' and spinning motivations out of fairy farts. That Benny adjusted his position after his pet palestinians turned out to be the violent assholes they always said they were is merely an inconvenient blip on his quest to tear down the oppressive political/academic climate preventing them from ascending to their natural state as intellectual gods to be feted by proles.

i don't know what postmodernism has to do with this. it seems entirely possible to determine what in fact happened in 1948, whether arabs left because arab leadership told them to leave, or because they were afraid of being massacred, or because they were forcefully expelled by jewish soldiers, or for any other reason. motivations are more nebulous but you can look into official idf documents (plan D) and what leaders such as ben gurion wrote.

Ideologically motivated historians have unearthed Azzam Pashas genocidal statements, Khaled Azm (president of Syria in 1949) said that the Arabs themselves exhorted the Palestinians to leave first, the Jordanian papers blamed Arab generals for making such declarations... all this evidence is dismissed by postmodernists because it is 'manipulated', with only Plan D (why D instead of earlier plans) being proof of the evil of Israel. I think it is far more likely that people panicked and left of their own volition in the face of an advancing enemy, like what is happening to Ukrainians and Masalit, than it is a deliberate strategy crafted by the adversary. A coincidental benefit, but hardly any more deliberate in intent compared to the more pressing objective of killing armed combatants.

Fifth: the Arab governments' invitation to the people of Palestine to flee from it and seek refuge in adjacent Arab countries, after terror had spread among their ranks in the wake of the Deir Yassin event. This mass flight has benefited the Jews and the situation stabilized in their favor without effort.... Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homeland, while it is we who constrained them to leave it. Between the invitation extended to the refugees and the request to the United Nations to decide upon their return, there elapsed only a few months.

so it was about deir yassin. people panicked and left of their own volition... because they believed they would be massacred

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