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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   34275 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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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:

  • TG1 Prevent a reduction of the current extents of Israel.
  • TG2-1 Minimize population and property loss due to present enemy action
  • TG2-2 Minimize the likelihood-damage product of future enemy action
  • TG3 Extend the borders of Israel to include current-day Gaza and the West Bank
  • TG4 Promote the prosperity of the Jewish people
  • TG5 Promote the personal power and prosperity of Israeli leadership
  • TG6-1 Maintain good relations with their current backers and alliance network
  • TG6-2 Promote prosperity of their current backers and alliance network
  • TG6-3 Increase the alliance network
  • TG7 Human benevolence

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:

  • TG2-1
  • TG1
  • TG2-2 TG4
  • TG6-1 TG5
  • TG6-2
  • TG3 TG6-3 TG7

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:

  • GS1: Mowing the lawn: reduce the current iteration of Hamas, keep a tight upper bound on the ability of whoever replaces them. This has failed dramatically, and so rejected in favor of other goals, but I included it for completeness.
  • GS2: Regime change, resulting in two states: the publicly claimed current approach, installing the Palestinian Authority with no border changes.
  • GS3: Palestinian population displacement: not really viable, since no one else will take them
  • GS4-1: Palestinian population elimination: Conventional genocide: physically viable, not at all politically viable
  • GS4-2: Palestinian population elimination, eventually: Genocide construed liberally, including suppression of Palestinian civic bodies and suppression of reproduction. Compatible with a lot of other scenarios, and maybe covertly viable, but the potential scandal and time scales needed make it probably politically non-viable.
  • GS5: Palestinian mass internment, Gaza annexation: something like what happened with indigenous NA tribes and the reservation system. Palestinians are restricted to even smaller areas.
  • GS6-1: Gaza annexation, permanent Palestinian subjugation: Irael extends to include current Gaza, Palestinians become second-class citizens on a permanent basis.
  • GS6-2: Gaza annexation, Palestinian incorporation: Israel extends to include current Gaza, Palestinians become citizens of the resulting joined state.

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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