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I don't accept "defensive" (would you label Russia's Ukraine war thus as well? After all, Ukraine was constantly attacking Russia's acquisitions in the Donbass), and if you keep seizing x units of land and then returning x/2 of them as a "gesture of goodwill" when settling with a thoroughly defeated adversary, this doesn't register as things being a wash regarding your expansionism.
As I argued in a parallel response to @RobertLiguori, I perceive an asymmetry between initating unjustified violence and retaliating to it. If the Palestinian actions that wronged the Israelis were morally just, then any given act of retaliation for them is at least significantly less just than if the prior action were not. On top of all of this, even just looking at casualty figures, the Israeli retaliation for any Palestinian action is wildly out of proportion - generally, any conflict seems to look like "Palestinians killed n Israelis; thereupon Israel killed 100n Palestinians, with another 5n Israeli soldier casualties".
Why are blood feuds might-makes-right, except for the trivial sense that if you don't even have the might to take a potshot at the enemy team's weakest spot then you are really left with no recourse? Either way, blood feuds seem to have been the default mode of justice for functioning human societies for the overwhelming part of human history. I understand that they are questionable from the perspective of someone living in a functioning modern state and we have found approaches to justice that work better, but all of these presume that there actually is a functioning state that is willing and able to mete out non-blood-feud justice. The whole conundrum of the Palestinians is that there isn't - nobody could judge the Israelis for driving them out of their homes, levelling their cities or killing them in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Any candidate sovereign that could force the parties into court by force of arms is making a show of looking away and whistling. In this setting, blood feuds empirically seem like the best social technology that humanity has discovered.
A defensive war means you were attacked. It does not mean ‘you were attacked for no good reason’. I’m sure there were plenty of Nazi propagandists who could have developed an excellent reason for their invasion of France: “The Versailles treaty was such an evil, it might as well have been an act of war!”
I think you need to flesh out your idea of what exactly constitutes ‘initiating’ and ‘unjustified violence’. I am willing to grant that the initial Zionist colonization of Israel was an injustice to the Palestinians living there, though not a particularly unique injustice historically speaking. I do not see how this gives Palestinians moral carte blanche to assault Israel from now until the end of eternity. At some point they need to accept the facts on the ground. I do not think the Germans would be justified in nuking London in 2024 because in their moral calculus the WW2 bombing of Germany was immoral. I do not think the Turks need to give Istanbul back to the Greeks.
History is a continuum. Nobody ever really ‘started it’
I see this as a category error. America killed half a million Japanese civilians in response to a surprise attack on a military installation which killed 2,500 sailors. Was this wildly out of proportion? The question doesn’t really make sense. There is no version of WW2 where the USA says “right boys, we gave the Japs a good drubbing at Midway, now we’re even stevens.”
Israel is not looking for ‘even stevens’, they are seeking to disarm an enemy which has declared war on them. Any amount of violence is justifiable to achieve such a goal, as long as reasonable efforts are made to direct that violence away from civilian targets.
Because they never end. Both parties think they are in the right, that their escalation is justified. They only finish when one side dominates the other into abandoning their claim.
Be careful what you wish for. Gazan culture (in the broadest possible interpretation of the term) is totally unfit to survive. They cannot exist on their own, and are kept alive only by massive infusions of resources provided by a world which has developed 20th century morality and understands the term ‘humanitarian crisis’. No regional power before the 20th century would ever suffer to have such a dangerous neighbor. Rome, for example, would never have tolerated an aggressive barbarian tribe 100 miles from the capital; They would have been annihilated.
To be clear, if Israel subscribed to your morality, then they would grind Gaza to nothing; Scatter the population to the 4 winds and kill any who resist. We would not be talking about 1% dead as if it were a big number. Such a thing is, historically, the norm.
I feel like I have to reiterate this too many times, but I don't mean to implore Israel to stop; I just want to implore my country (/the Western countries) to stop helping Israel. It can't be helped if people put their self-interest over morality, but as I see it we have no interest in the well-being of Israel.
(Same for your Rome argument; if Rome built its capital in Barbarian territory and got annihilated, sucks for them, but my neck of the woods is not obliged to send them aid.)
Uh, I think that in the ideal case the blood feud ends when both parties recognise that they have done approximately equal damage to each other, and does a greater deal to discourage blood being spilt to begin with. The ancient Scandinavians had a system of blood feuds, but outside of some degenerate cases like Iceland their society survived and prospered.
Again, I'm viewing this from my perspective, not some Kantian "I must deem the Israelis/Germans wrong and stop helping them <=> the Israelis/Germans must realise they are in the wrong themselves and take the boot to the face" universal-or-bust one. If the Germans actually thought the WW2 bombing of Germany was immoral and kept suffering from the consequences, then yes, they should go ahead and nuke London. I would think they are wrong and the Brits are right and send aid to the Brits in that case, without thinking that the Germans are committing any moral mistake beyond just getting the initial moral calculus wrong.
I think Israel-on-Palestine is almost as close to Israel having unambiguously started it as any of those things get in history. Their ancestors were driven out of Israel by Romans almost 2k years ago, the ancestors of the Palestinians always universally treated the Jews that stayed behind or made it back better than any other major power of the day, and the invading Israelis had no meaningful cultural ties to the area remaining apart from a carefully nursed religious belief. Then some Germans go genocidal on the Jews, and the answer of the allied powers that defeat Germany is to... enable the Jews to invade and displace the Palestinians? In what world was this a sane and just solution, as opposed to the obvious choice of carving out Israel from the defeated Axis powers? With some care you could even have used a part of Italy, finally avenging the original sin from two thousand years ago.
I am trying to understand your position, so please let me know if I have got this right:
• Israel is inherently bad/unjust, by the nature of it's creation.
• Because of this, there is nothing that Israel can do that would be good/just, excepting perhaps to dissolve itself.
•Similarly, there is nothing that Palestinians could possibly do to Israel that would be bad/unjust, and no Israeli response to any Palestinian action (excepting perhaps to just take a bloody nose) could be good/just
•You do not implore Israel to stop. I think this is not because you think Israel is justified in any moral sense, (i.e. blood feud) but because you acknowledge that asking Israel to behave justly under your model would be asking the impossible. You simply ask that uninvolved actors act according to the 'Israel is inherently bad' idea
Is this fair? If so, what separates Israel from all previous historical colonisations, or even conquests? Why don't the Turks have to give Istanbul back to the Greeks? Would Aborigines in Australia/Canada/America be justified in waging war against their colonisers? Would their colonisers be justified in defending themselves?
If not, what actions could Israel take, short of dissolving itself or losing its identity as a Jewish state, that would allow it to achieve the status of a state which is allowed to defend itself, in your eyes?
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Arabs suck at war, news at 11. Israeli defensive tech and policies prevent palestinians from easily driving on a road to run over jews or stab kids or have missiles rain down. It is absolutely ridiculous that a neoghbouring state would be allowed to rain missiles on your civilians without retaliation, much less how they celebrate it. The presumption that the palestinians are acting with restraint is bullshit, their feeble kill rate is a function of their incapability, not lack of desire. If the palestinians want a better kill ratio, get good.
Apart from this sentence being almost perfectly constructed to invite the "which of the two do you mean, now?" response - allowed by whom? I don't mean to presume to tell the Israelis what they can and can't do, but the main thing being discussed is whether I (as a non-Israeli) am supposed to send money to help the Israelis, Palestinians, both or neither.
Either way, what would happen if the Palestinians "got good" is a fully unexplored counterfactual. If we assume things are operating on blood feud logic, it wouldn't be surprising that if they actually managed to level the kill count and get their 100ksomething kills of Israelis, the Palestinians would consider the debt settled and be willing to negotiate earnestly. (Of course, 100k dead Israelis would likely make Israel go nuclear, with the US paying and delivering the nukes.)
This is so bafflingly wrong that I cannot believe you said this earnestly. is this what the palestinians say they themselves want, or is this what you hope they are saying because you are steelmanning a case (poorly) for them. The hamas charter calls for the genocide of all jews, the houthis call for the genocide of all jews, daily arab twitter and telegram calls for the genocide of all jews. To presume that all the Arabs have to do is kill just 100k more jews and they'll negotiate DOWN from their starting position is illogical and presumes incompetence at basic decision making capabilities that even the most smooth brained retards would find offputting.
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Why is ‘justice’ the framework through which to view tribal land ownership? Throughout history many different tribes have occupied this land, have migrated in and out, have been destroyed or vanquished or assimilated.
"Justice"/moral right is what I mostly see being invoked to convince populations of third-party countries including ones I live and pay taxes in to support Israel, transfering things of value and exposing themselves to risk. This is why I see the need to argue against it. If I am asked to sacrifice for a cause for the sake of justice, I would like to know if the cause is actually just.
Military aid to Israel is not actually about justice, though. Politicians prefer to pretend that their acts of rational realpolitik are justified, but they make their decisions based (mostly) on strategy.
The west in general and the USA in particular have several key interests in the region, like the Suez Canal. Israeli intelligence and military power are useful leverage on those interests. Back when he was a senator, Joe Biden famously said Israeli aid is the best investment the USA makes and that if Israel did not exist, America would have to create it to preserve its interests.
So what is actually the realpolitik argument there? How can Israel keep the Suez canal open in a way that the US other powers in the region couldn't? The assertion that there is actually some convoluted realpolitik reason for whatever the US middle east policy of the day is - as opposed to blindly doing whatever the lobbyists of the day demand because their similarly short-sighted investors will make their stock value go up if it happens - looks a lot like a series of all-caps hail-mary "trust the plan"s. In the meantime, approximately every major problem that the Americans face in the Middle East themselves is their own creation. If the politicians of the cold war were given a crystal ball that told them of the future of Iran and Afghanistan, with all their implications for American interests, as a consequence of the interventions that they were advocating for then, I'm sure some of them would have managed to concoct a speech about how the Islamic Republic and the Taliban are also necessary to preserve American interests.
Israel keeps one of America’s #1 enemies, Iran, in check. Israel provides an overwatch that prevents Hezbollah, a very anti-American power, from dominating Lebanon. The Israeli military has in the past carried out strikes on anti-American regional powers that America was no doubt very pleased with, eg against Syria.
Does this necessarily mean that Israel is worth the price tag? No, but there’s genuine geopolitics reasons to play nice with them.
Would Hezbollah even be anti-American without the American support for Israel? The situation may be different from Iran whose present political system emerged as a direct reaction against past American chicanery, but on the other hand even Vietnam, which got treated a lot worse than Iran, is basically friendly to the US nowadays, and the Taliban are also acting all conciliatory since their comeback. I'm sure that if the US wanted to be friends with Iran in a post-Israel world, they could do so quite easily by just promising to keep Saudi Arabia on a leash and pushing them to agree on mutually acceptable spheres of influence. The barriers would actually be on the US side, since it seems like the deep state can nurse very old grudges over matters such as BP and the embassy hostage taking.
Yes. Hezbollah is specifically an anti-colonialist movement opposed to western influence, and their original archenemy was actually France, another key US ally. They’re also in theory revolutionary socialists(but Muslim) who are buddies with Russia as a legacy of the Cold War. Oh, and they were founded as an Iranian proxy.
There isn’t a world in which the US and Hezbollah were ever friends.
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I don't know the full extent of what Israel's intelligence services do for the west because they obviously don't advertise it. We know that they have one of the largest and best-funded intelligence services in the world. Whatever it is they do with that money, Joe Biden clearly thinks the USA is getting their money's worth.
Since all of this stuff is top-secret one of the only things I can point to is a joke from an old British TV show. Yes, Minister and its sequel series Yes, Prime Minister were infamous for portraying the government of Britain so accurately that the actual government thought the show's writers had a spy on the inside feeding them stories. Yes, Prime Minister once did a joke about the British Foreign Office hiding strategic intelligence from the PM, and the Israeli ambassador passing that same intelligence to the PM in a secret meeting.
That's just a script from an old TV show, of course. But it's not like Mossad is going to come out and explain what they do for the governments of the west in exchange for all that money. All we can say is that whatever it is they do, the governments of the west are apparently satisfied with their performance.
For what it's worth, the writers of Yes, Minister had at least two regular sources of information that were highly placed within the actual government--one Tory and one Labour, as I recall. A number of the minor side plots, usually the more insane ones, were references to actual events.
In one episode, the major characters went on a trip to the fictional nation of 'Qumran', and were aghast that their Islamic hosts would not be serving alcohol at the party. So they devised a strategem where alcohol would be stored nearby in a 'secure transmission room' and each member of the diplomatic team would take it in turns to 'confer with London' and refresh his drink. This actually happened, though the Islamic nation in question was not Arab, as depicted in the show.
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