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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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The best thing Israel could do for the Palestinian people is to straight up occupy Gaza and the West Bank and declare them to be parts of Israel and their inhabitants citizens. Then punish the attackers as common violent criminals.

Also this really doesn't look good for Mossad. I expected better from them...

Why would they make them citizens where they can have a vote? That would be suicide. It would be strategically preferable to leave them stateless.

Why would they make them citizens where they can have a vote?

This can be seen as much a problem with democracy as it is a problem with the Palestinian people. Besides, Israeli democracy is going to have huge issues with the Haredim throwing around their demographic weight in a few decade's time, creating a few million more Israeli Arabs who are never going to vote for the same parties as the Haredim will delay their takeover for a generation at least by diluting the vote share of these people (Israels Proportional Representation system means extreme Arab votes counteract extreme Haredim votes when it comes to coalition building, ensuring moderates continue to hold the reins of power).

It's like killing two birds with one stone, you get to destroy the attackers self justification of being freedom fighters and brand them as being nothing more than the basest (note: not the same as basedest) violent criminals, denying them of a glorious death in battle with the enemy (which they and their families would happily take) and leaving them to rot in prison, and on the other hand you delay the demographic tsunami of your own ultra-orthodox elements overwhelming your system.

Fighting a government that gives you a vote doesn’t necessarily stop you from calling yourself a freedom fighter. Ireland’s vote for Sinn Féin in the 1918 UK General Election and the subsequent war it legitimized comes to mind.

The best thing Israel could do for the Palestinian people is to straight up occupy Gaza and the West Bank and declare them to be parts of Israel and their inhabitants citizens

RIP Israel. This will be the end of the state. Much better idea is to talk with Egypt to annex it and move them somewhere beyond the Aswan dam

I don’t know, I think that the time has come for them to decide: is Israel a democracy or not? If they want to continue down the pathway to become an apartheid theocratic state, then that’s their business but they should be called out for it or and shouldn’t continue to receive foreign policy deference and foreign aid in abundance. If they are going to remain a democracy that is excellent, and I believe will ultimately be revealed as the correct choice.

Israel is democracy. Which is orthogonal to how religion shapes their society. And how is Israel apartheid state. I often seen it mention, but never explained. South Africa wanted to subjugate the blacks. Israel wants the palestinians gone from their land (choose whichever their suits your political side). They have absolutely no interest in administering or even exploiting them.

They are now, but this nonsense about either deporting all of the Palestinians or maintaining a status quo in which the palestians are not Israeli citizens is basically a form of apartheid

They’d gladly give Gaza to Egypt but the Egyptians obviously don’t want them.

This would result in the Palestinian people losing their homeland forever. A one-state solution would mean the eventual replacement of all Palestinians because of Israel’s soft privileging of Jews and the extreme birth rates of the Hasidim. Given that the Palestinians seem earnestly to value their culture and peoplehood, this simply isn’t viable.

Palestinians also seem to earnestly value the destruction of Israel.

I don't know how this all ends (if it ever does), but I wouldn't bet on everyone getting an outcome they're happy with.

Israel is running into the problem France had in Algeria and the whites had in South Africa. Once the minority becomes too numerous they can't be controlled. Had there been a million Iraqis the US would have won. With a booming population they simply couldn't. France controlled Algeria relatively well when their population was small. With the economic benefits of being a part of France their population boomed and it just became impossible for France to police that many Algerians. Apartheid South Africa would have been hard to maintain with a 4% white population. The Palestinian population is increasing rapidly and is getting to the size where counter insurgency is hard.

The difference is that in South Africa both groups were in the same country and the white minority very deliberately refused to retreat to the Cape (where they could have engineered a permanent white majority) and cede the rest of the country to the majority.

In Israel, the domestic Arabs have been largely pacified. The non-citizens in the West Bank and Gaza are the risk.

Palestinian birth rates are decreasing, whereas Israel’s is stable + 20% have extremely high birth rates which will overshadow Palestine in 60 years

Palestine has a younger population and a high birth rate. That religious fundamentalists with unimpressive average Iqs and dysfunctional ways of living are reproducing at a high rate is a problem for Israel, not a feature.

The Haredi have an average IQ above 110. In fact there’s an above single digit chance that the literal smartest person in the world is sitting in an Israeli housing project arguing about what counts as cheese for the purpose of Jewish dietary laws.

The super genius jews myth doesn't really seem to apply in Israel. Their Pisa scores are below average and their average Iq is less than a hundred. The Haredi have shown little in terms of intellectual achievement.

Because lots of Israeli Jews are not Ashkenazi and the Haredi don’t want intellectual achievement.

Do the Chareidim have unimpressive IQs? By 2019, Jewish fertility exceeded Arab fertility in Israel.

Seems to me like they already lost. It's now just a debate over the shape of the final peace.

A lost war is never worth it. And Gaza can't win.

What do they get from this? Do they stop Israel from taking land? Of course not. It's just blood and misery for nothing.

A lost war is never worth it.

Truer words... does this apply to other current events though?

Of course. Honestly, Ukraine might end up with even the winner worse off for fighting it.

In Ukraine both sides are losing. It is unclear which is losing faster. They are competing on this metric.

It looks like what Palestinians decided to do in response will have many people say "the Israelis are the good guys here, at least they'll just bomb the women and children instead of selling them to sex slavery".

Or it seems based on the Twitter videos the Palestinians are raping the women, then killing them, and then parading around their naked bodies.

Considering the amount of sex slaves and their history in Israel I'd advise the JIDF to pick a different thing.

What are you talking about?

Exactly what I wrote? Israel used to be a prolific place for sex trafficking and slavery. But they changed their tune in the late 90's after a US DoS Trafficking in Persons report ranked them as Tier 3. Meaning Israel was then in a group of nations that could face sanctions for the abysmal state of their country.

Granted that Israel treats Palestine pretty badly, there’s not a lot Palestine can do about it. This is a real ‘the strong do what they will and the weak put up with what they must’ situation.

Should Palestinians in Gaza just forget the last 18 years and the thousands men, women and children bombed to death?

Yes, yes they should. It sucks but there is no alternative. Israel is too far advanced and strong now compared to the Palestinians, end of story. The time to compete was 50 years ago, and the way to compete was not rockets and bullets but rather a singular focus on economic growth to the point where your soft power grew so much you could influence the players that really matter (lets be honest here, both Palestine and Israel are too small to influence the world by themselves) to put extreme pressure on Israel because they wanted to trade with you (which is what Israel is doing now to the Palestinians, see the proposed normalization of relations with parts of the Arab world).

Violence no longer works on large scales in the 21st century (see Russia v Ukraine) if you want to create a peaceful country and prosperity for your people. The only reason it works for Israel doing the reverse is that the Palestinians are much weaker (to the point that it's no longer two equals fighting - which leads to a lot of damage to the world; but more like police subjugating a riot - minimal damage to the world if the police handle it right), and because Israeli economic heft will mean other countries turn a blind eye to what is going on, were Palestine to try the same, they would rightfully be sanctioned into the ground. Until Hamas understands this the very people they want to help will suffer even more than they would in a counterfactual world where Hamas suddenly disappeared off the face of this planet.

Even if Hamas wants to take the fight to Israel physically, the way to do it is not through the sticks and stones tier rockets but rather through diverting economic resources into high end military research to make yourself a plausible equal of Israel in the domain, and then threaten them (this is never going to happen, but it's still the right way to do things if you choose this path).

The taliban defeated NATO after NATO spent 2 trillion dollars fighting them. If anything tech is helping Palestine. We have seen cheap drones that are mass produced take out an Israeli tank today. With every Palestinian having a cell phone and most of the middle east on social media it has become harder for Israel to brutally suppress Palestinians. Israel can no longer control the narrative when so much of the public's view comes from the internet and not pro Israel media organizations. The Palestinians are increasing in numbers and fighting an ongoing insurgency at home is cancerous for a society. Furthermore, Israel is already deeply split between conservatives, an extremely woke portion of jews and sectarian fundamentalists that are breeding at a high rate.

The taliban defeated NATO after NATO spent 2 trillion dollars fighting them.

Eh. The Taliban 'defeated' NATO by being a thorn in their side until NATO decided the juice wasnt worth the squeeze and bailed. That would not work for Palestinians. Suppressing an agressive Palestine isn't a side project for Israel, it's existential. You'd better believe that if Afghanistan were in the middle of the Mohave desert and rocketed Phoenix every decade or so the US would still be there.

Israel can no longer control the narrative when so much of the public's view comes from the internet and not pro Israel media organizations.

That might have been true yesterday but a few viral videos of Israelis getting executed and lynched by Palestinians will turn global perception of the Israeli-Palestine conflict around right quick.

The US could absolutely have won in Afghanistan if it was willing to accept extreme civilian casualties, wipe out villages etc. The reality of an occupation is that if you have fuel, food and resources, mostly you really can just kill people until a population is pacified. It would have worked even in Chechnya, Putin just didn’t have the guts.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that Putin was doing that in Chechnya, it was just cheaper and easier to give Ramzan Kadyrov what he needed to pay off a sufficient portion of the chechens to establish total control in exchange for loyalty.

Pacifying Chechnya was difficult and extremely costly. There are twice as many Palestinians as Chechnyas and they have phones. Russians at least weren't continuously filmed during their operation. Israel has falling support in the polls and going full Chechnya won't improve that.

So far they seem to be using their phones mostly to publicize their own atrocities.

That depends if it is filtered through American media. I am mainly getting Israeli bombings, beatings of Palestinians and attacks.

If Israel kills every palestinian tomorrow, in 5 years all will be forgotten. The half assed genocides get remembered. The full one don't.

That's basically one of only three stable solutions, too. The second one is the Palestinians kill all the Jews, the third is the Jews all go somewhere else far away.

The Palestinian diaspora extends beyond Israel/West Bank/Gaza, though.

A lot of the Palestinian diaspora is Christians who don’t care much, eg. Bukele is on the Zionist side etc.

The more India rises as a power and the more Islamic immigration to Europe continues to cause integration issues, the more every non-Muslim country will support Israeli brutality against Arabs.

This makes no sense. Israel wants millions of Arabs to move from where they currently live. Palestinians want Arabs to continue to live in the same place as their family always lived in. Supporting Israel is supporting mass muslim immigration to Europe. Israel has sponsored migration into Europe while destabalizing the middle east. If we don't want massive arab immigration to Europe than not forcefully resettling millions of Palestinians is a good plan. One of the main critiques of neoconservative policies in the middle east has been massive amounts of migrants into Europe. It is also almost impossible to repatriate muslims to Palestine today as Israel blocks it. Palestine meanwhile wants Europe to return migrants.

Almost no Muslim immigration to Europe is from Palestine. And again, it isn’t really about that, it’s that sympathy with the Jewish side rises as Islamist terrorism increases in the West.

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The taliban defeated NATO after NATO spent 2 trillion dollars fighting them

Except that the Taliban didn't defeat them, right? The Taliban managed to kill all of 2000 US troops in 20 years, and they succeeded only after US troops left. I don't think the IDF is going to be leaving Israel any time soon.

That is called losing the battles but winning the war.

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