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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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I'm pro Israel as a matter of practicality. I don't believe there is some universal obligation of the world at large or of people of the present to somehow make right wrongs of the past. This is a thing that may be worked out between an individual injured party and and their injurer, but Palestinians have a lot of different opinions about what they are owed and the center of mass of those opinions is something like a complete right to return to familial properties and a single state. Israel of course never can grant that.

Palestinians are also completely incapable of governing themselves in a way that makes them an acceptable neighbor. You can argue that Hamas doesn't represent Palestine (despite being elected), and yet if your average 22-40 year old Palestinian wanted to enforce some order other than Hamas, they could band together and govern themselves and do so. They could organize, police, enforce order. Eventually keep things calm until Israeli hearts soften and a two-state solution is back on the table. This would all be achievable were it what they wanted. They do not want it or incapable of achieving.

And so you're left with a Israel having essentially ungoverned barbarians on their border that they have been prevented from dealing with due to intense international pressure for decades. This is not a stable state of affairs. It seems clear to me that the best thing for Israel to due is to scatter them to the wind, and the best thing for the world to do is to force Arab countries to take Palestinians in as refugees, each an accordance to what they can assimilate, and then quickly assimilate them. No ghettos. No extended families kept close together. And no weird second-class citizenships or eternal refugee status. Utter assimilation. End them as a people, as the old testament would command. Dragging this on has been good for no one.

Personally I favor formal recognition of Palestine as a single unitary state, then letting Fatah-Hamas war 2.0 kick off. It'll be like the Pakistani Civil War, except without any external intervention. Kick out all settlers and let the Palestinians decide what sort of state they really want: one where it enjoys the freedom to starve without Israeli supplies. If Palestines borders are sovereign so are its trading partners, who are under no obligation to supply food or electricity to a neighbour, much less a hostile one.

Israel can’t allow Palestinians to rule themselves before being pacified because Israel has no strategic depth. The Iron Dome vs Gaza is one thing, the risk of an October 7 repeat shoots up hugely if they get full control of Area C.

True. If Palestine is a formal state then retaliatory actions are more justified: its not an oppressed minority in your borders, but a hostile yet weaker neighbor