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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Israel has defeated Egypt several times before; there's very few people living in the Sinai and a border at the Suez gives them the physical space necessary for death camps.

So the plan is

  1. Invade Egypt and make the big powers very unhappy because of how they need the Suez Canal for their trade
  2. Move a few million Palestinians out of Gaza and into the Sinai where they'll be tortured, starved, brainwashed and/or exterminated in death camps
  3. Somehow hope this doesn't turn into a darkly ironic Warsaw Ghetto uprising but larger and with more tunnels
  4. Somehow avoid having the Israeli economy reduced to zero
  5. Somehow get weapons and munitions to do all this from... the US? Or who?
  6. Secure all their other borders against air and ground attacks at the same time

See Nazi Germany could try this kind of stunt (while fighting first-rate world powers) because they actually were a big, strong country with the armies and industry needed to conquer large territories and exterminate people en masse. Israel is not a big country and enjoys less freedom of action, their army is smaller than Turkey's.

Thailand has a bigger army. Indonesia has a bigger army. Size matters and Israel isn't big, they have no room to make errors and little resources to fall back on.

Moreover, Israel is reliant for its suffrage on a moral system that such actions would undermine. Israel exists and is tolerated in large part because of Western guilt over antisemitism and the Holocaust, a belief in the idea of self determination for ethnic minorities. The moment those beliefs disappear in the USA and the west, so does Israel.

Israel is a nuclear state

South Africa was, too, one upon a time.

South Africa had 6 primitive nuclear weapons made with barely enriched uranium and was less than 10% white(Israel has an outright Jewish majority).

In 1994 whites made up just 10% of the population in South Africa. Even in a fully integrated Israel-Palestine Jews would be 40-50% of the population at the start.

Plus, the whites knew that to some extent South Africa remaining a broadly capitalist country in which they could keep their private property was likely under the international system. Black South Africans mostly don’t hate white people. Even today, the great majority of the richest people and largest landowners in South Africa are white; whites own ~70% of agricultural land and are overrepresented even in the current governing coalition with the ANC.

In the event of an Israel-Palestine I very much doubt the relationship between Jews and Arabs will look like that 30 years after integration.