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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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what the heck does Israel do about it?

You punish them, like any other state should. Failure to punish is complicity.

More generally, how can a state recover when a substantial minority refuses to go along with its orders

Punishment will continue until morality improves. They can implement mandatory educstional curricula that aims to dismantle notions of Jewish supremacy. Failure to do this is evidence of complicity.

But they seem incapable. The article looks at how the Shin Bet (Israeli FBI?) is systematically hampered in investigating crimes by settlers against Palestinians, at all levels, and can't even trust its own members.

In my city, there's been a massive increase in gun violence since the BLM protests in 2020. It doesn't seem gang-related, it seems like people feuding, independent drug dealers warring over turf, that sort of thing. The police, in addition to being demoralized, are largely incapable of doing anything about it because the surrounding community won't talk to them, and at least in some cases actively works to hide evidence. Are those police complicit?

We've also had a wave of petty crime because a city attorney refused to prosecute certain types of crime. Eventually this meant that the police stopped making arrests, and then people stopped reporting the crime (and then the crime rate statistics went down, but not because crime stopped happening). That was from just one guy in government making a stand, backed by enough political support that he couldn't be easily replaced. It sounds like Israel has many more people like that.

I suppose the boring answer is to, in whatever order possible, a) get those parties out of government, b) reform government agencies at all levels to enforce the law even-handedly, and c) actually go after anyone and everyone involved in the crimes and cover-ups. Hopefully with a side order of d) removing the settlements completely. But I literally cannot recall an instance of a modern state pulling something like this off. That might well be on me, though - if you've got some examples, I'm all ears.