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Notes -
Followup to my post here earlier where I wondered why Israel didn't forcibly establish filtration camps to stop the world, acquire every person in Gaza, determine which collaborate with Hamas, and release the remainder: The Telegraph: Former British special forces poised to deliver aid to new Gaza ‘gated communities’. They're proposing doing just that, controlling who gets into their safe zones, just in-place rather than stopping the world to do it. Props to I think @2rafa for calling it in advance.
I'm not sure how to expect the proposal to evolve from here as it makes contact with reality, though we can expect some likely elements from first principles:
How do you all see it working out? What will work, what won't? What failure modes are most likely?
As beta testing. The British and American militaries, various three letter agencies and police will be eagerly observing and giving the Israelis and their mercenaries input and making tweaks in running the camps. Palestinian people get used as the lab rats to work the kinks out implementing the Orwellian nightmare police state of the future.
Then in the classic Imperial Boomerang effect they take the tools field tested on the poor bastards in Palestine and eagerly apply them in cracking down on future dissenters in the UK, US, etc.
Wouldn't be surprised if things the Israeli government and these mercenaries do to Palestinians in this campaign wind up one day being wielded against some posters on this forum.
..that's really not a plausible take. The situation is incomparable, in addition, Palestinians are really, really not any smart.
Why? If Trump wins, which seems likely, you get a smooth on-ramp for the China liberation war. Who is against that? Nobody likes China, save maybe a few expat Chinese. At least on Twitter, SV types are signalling pretty hard that they're up for the war on China.
Already been happening for ages, man. Numerous American police departments have had ongoing training and tech exchange partnerships with the Israeli government for years. Domestic police and law enforcement agencies rolling out what was first wielded against Iraq and Afghanistan onto US streets is old news. Every podunk pd has an MRAP now.
If that's the level we're sinking to - [your demographic group] are a bunch of smelly morons.
I have no idea what you are talking about or what it has to do with the topic at hand but it sounds like it'll involve a lot of radioactive fallout.
It's useless for them.
You said that- not me. PISA scores and results speak for themselves. Arabs underperform.
Probably, but that's not bad. Fallout decays fast.
Elaborate. I don't think the militarization of police is intended to prepare them with better tools for giving tickets and responding to DV calls, it's adopting tools that suck for actual policing but have blatant counterinsurgency applications.
Some circles debate whether [whatever your demographic is] even qualify as homo sapiens.
Speak plainly about whatever you mean. All I can piece together is that whatever it is includes something about a war involving China.
You think small police departments around the US are going to get much value out of fucking MRAPs.
Bullshit.
You think Gaza experience will help American police oppress Americans - ignoring that Americans are far more heavily armed and have far, far less police officers than say, Europeans.
What are we even talking about?
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That's basically the plot of the Turner Diaries, which is interesting but not something I expected to hear from the left. Reminds me I should finish that book review.
As for strategies used abroad coming home, as you might suspect we are somewhat more concerned about the rhetoric and tactics of the "anti-colonialists" coming home to us, being as we are disgusting Settlers illegally occupying the traditional Unceded Land of Turtle Island, marking us for righteous ethnic cleansing by Decolonial Violence.
Also we already know what being a target of the security state is like. One of those "not giving your enemy a path to retreat guarantees he'll fight to the death" issues the left has created for itself through its dominance and abuse of every institution.
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Not enough iterations to establish the new culture. The failure mode is going to be Hamas smuggling weapons and explosives in via drones/tunnels and people not ratting the recipients out or killing them themselves. So an Israeli patrolling the fence gets killed, the IDF goes back in, razes the camp, shoots the perps and forty times more random Palestinians, refilters the camp, another weapon is smuggled in. Theoretically, the inmates should realize after a few cycles that preventing this by eliminating Hamas sympathizers is better, but the cycles are going to be long enough and noisy enough that it's unlikely that this pattern will be internalized by the Palestinians.
It's not an unsolvable problem, but it's going to be hard to explain why the PRC doing this to Uyghurs is bad and Israel doing the same to Palestinians is acceptable.
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I had no great foresight, sadly. My point was more that the desired Israeli solution to the conflict, ultimately, is to place the Palestinians under the care of some allied-ish government willing to mete out whatever necessary justice to keep the peace. The ideal would be to split the Palestinian Territories into governates or ‘Emirates’ ruled as de facto authoritarian police states by another Muslim country, perhaps Saudi Arabia or maybe even somewhere further afield, with the support of Israeli intelligence to quickly neutralize any threats. In exchange the government in question might be paid some amount of money and allowed the prestige of running Al Aqsa. The global Muslim community wouldn’t (and doesn’t) care much if other Arabs were being nasty to the Palestinians, which would lower tensions all around.
What if they were to force them on a non-allied government? If completely unconstrained by world opinion/sanctions, Israel might do something like force march the entire population of Gaza into Lebanon and then just annex Gaza. It's not like there's much Lebanon/Hezbollah could do to stop it.
To be fair, I don't think the current government is capable of human rights abuses on that scale despite what its detractors might say. But after a few more iterations of the cycles of violence, who knows. Not to mention the fact that Israel's government is going to be increasingly fundamentalist as the ultra-orthodox become an ever larger segment of the population.
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There is no allied-ish government, because the Palestinians have antagonized every possibility. The other Arab governments are happy for them to be a weapon against Israel, but they sure as hell don't want responsibility for them. Iran wants them even less.
Does it have to be Arab? I mean the British were in Palestine for decades. And so if anyone could take on the challenge, why not King Charles?
I'm pretty sure the British are done with the colonial game, which is too bad as they were one of the better players.
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What exactly is the end goal here? Do you actually think that building concentration camps is something you do when you're expecting to negotiate peace with the population you're interning in them? Israel at the very least should have some distinct memories of what it means when a government builds concentration camps for your ethnicity. I think that there'll be violent resistance from the Palestinian population (amongst whom Hamas support rates are doubtless trending 100% at this point), but that didn't stop the german concentration camps from doing their job. Personally I think that the camps will be a failure in the long term - the damage they do to the moral credibility of Israel and Israel's supporters will outweigh any potential benefits. But in the short term, Mordechai Kahan and a few other officials will make a lot of money, and in that sense the camps will be a success.
I'm not privy to Israeli policy discussions and I haven't even studied the topic intensely, so this is necessarily facile and off-the-cuff, sorry. My impression of the terminal goals of the Israeli government are, in no order:
This is only a quickly brainstormed list of generic goals of good governance with some extra ethnocentric emphasis, plus TG3. I used a pairwise comparison chart to figure out my guess at their relative priorities:
Which passes some sanity checks: defense above prosperity, land growth in conflict with not annoying allies and human benevolence and at the bottom since they can afford to play a long game, personal graft about middle priority, minimizing present loss prevention over minimizing future loss prevention.
These goals and goal priorities give us a number of possible compatible goal scenarios for the current conflict, which roughly map to the same old list of options from the policy wonks:
I've probably missed a few. The current 'gated community' proposal seems consistent with GS2, GS5, GS4-2, GS6-1, and GS6-2. Establishing a safe zone and expanding it gradually doesn't seem avoidable in GS2, GS6-1, and GS6-2. I don't see a way to distinguish which end goal is being pursued at this time, but the obvious experiment seems to be to wait and see what the conditions are in the safe zones, to rule GS4-2, GS5, GS6-1, GS6-2 in or out. If the safe zones are expanded over time, and their populations increase over time, and abuses are minimized with good mechanisms to detect them, that seems like decent evidence that we're in the GS2 timeline. Personally, I expect GS2 in the near term, and GS6-1 evolving to GS6-2 within 50 years.
What do you think of this framework? Do you agree with my proposal to distinguish which timeline we're in? Does extending the framework somehow give us more options for analysis or prediction?
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Im pretty sure this was a big part of US Native American policy. It helped that the population differential was way higher, but people in Santa Fe don’t have to worry about Radical Navajo Terrorism anymore.
... But the Navajo have generally had "stay between these sacred mountains" as a pre-existing element of their culture, which is why they are one of the least conquered Native Nation today. Maybe the Comanche or Apache would be better examples? Geronimo's whole claim to fame was successfully terrorizing settlers until finally being imprisoned in Oklahoma.
It would be trivial to point to a tribe that was wiped out as an example of a successful counterterrorism policy. The question is if it is possible to pacify a people without killing approximately all of them.
Cherokees.
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Deportation to the east
Far from most likely but by far the worst case scenario.
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Somehow we're ending up at concentration camps again.
It's not special and the unfortunately inevitable destination of the necessities of control by the modern state when it has to deal with enemy populations at scale. The grim irony in Israel doing it should not be lost on anyone.
Like all iterations from the Boers to the Uyghurs, it'll have abuses. Let's hope the worst of humanity doesn't manifest as much as it can given such conditions. That these are not to be staffed by Israelis is an encouraging sign. Putting people who hate each other (legitimately or not) in situation of absolute power over each other is seldom a good idea.
In the grim darkness of the Middle East, there is only war.
(I say this half-jokingly, but only half)
That’s pretty much the point of my flair, but I like your version as well.
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