naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
I've seen a few people wonder why some people support Palestine in this conflict. While videos like this one (which predates the current conflict) are undoubtedly propaganda, they do offer a window into the worldview of a person who supports Palestine.
Wikipedia claims that 40% of male Palestinians have spent some time in an Israeli prison. I hear about Israel demolishing 55,000 Palestinian structures as of 2022. I remember that Gaza had been blockaded by Egypt and Israel since 2005, despite Israel supposedly backing out of Gaza.
Even if every example of Israelis killing Palestinian civilians was collateral damage or accident, even if we assume that the cameras showing Israeli brutality always start rolling at the perfect moment to make it look like unnecessary brutality on their part, it's obvious to me that Palestine won't be able to grow under its current conditions of occupation. If the United States supports Israel, then Israel will prevail and Palestine will lose little by little every year. It will be a slow motion catastrophe, and there is nothing Palestine can do about it.
Is national, regional and global stability worth anything to the Palestinian people under such conditions? No wonder people are posting music videos in this thread of Palestinians with pipe dreams of Russia becoming a global super power again, and supporting Palestine to spite the United States. They're fucked, and I think there's something noble in fighting until you're wiped from the Earth by your enemy. Even if history remembers you as a monster, they will remember you.
You don’t have to choose a side, actually. You’re an American, presumably, you live far away and have no way of knowing.
If I had to advocate for my side, though, I’d say this - in 2005, when Israel unilaterally left Gaza, the gazans could have simply chose to declare a new state and live their lives. They could have been a middle-eastern Singapore. Instead, they chose to eliminate all of the PA’s presence in the strip (by throwing PA officials from high-rises, if memory serves) and double-down on rocketry. I think that says a lot. (Also, numerous other atrocities and the fact that post ‘48 there was a mixed Jewish-Arab side of the armistice line, and another judenfrei side)
I see United Nations OCHA data like this, where it says that 3,208 Palestinian civilians have died from 2008 to 2020 (compared to 177 Israeli civilians over the same period)
So your POV is we should reward incompetence and punish competence at preserving the lives of one's people?
The conflict is so simple it is silly. Israel always gets attacked. Whether its in 1973 or 2023. Its response is always measured, because it fears a backlash from the international community (correctly, because its mostly antisemites) if they execute the proper response, and thus the whole world is impoverished.
The allies did terrible things in WWII, firebombing Dresden and killing many, many civilians. Does that mean that the Axis and the Allies were morally equivalent sides?
Hamas hides their bases inside hospitals and schools and apartment buildings. Israel cannot just let Hamas continue to fire rockets at them - so they retaliate, but because Hamas hides in civilian areas those civilians become casualties of war. This is very different from IDF soldiers going into Gaza, raping and killing Palestinian women and then parading their bodies around to cheers of "god is great" from fellow Israelis - which is what Hamas has video'd itself doing. Hamas is an islamist organization that wants to help build a global caliphate and genocide all Jews everywhere. It's easy to "pick a side"
I'm honestly a little conflicted about who I should support.
This might sound a little glib but it's an honest question: Why do you feel compelled to support either side, here, or even to have an opinion on the matter at all? Seems to me that something's been snuck into the process such that the question is being begged. But should this be the case?
Here’s a question for you guys. Um… Is it… is it necessary? Is it necessary that every single person on this planet um, expresses every single opinion that they have on every single thing that occurs all at the same time? Is that… is that necessary?
Um… Or to ask in a slightly different way, um, can… can anyone shut the fuck up? Can… can anyone, any… any… any one, any single one, can any one… shut the fuck up about anything– About any… any single thing? Can any single person shut the fuck up about any singlе thing for an hour? You know, is that… is that possible?
It seems to have peaked during the Floyd riots, but we're still recovering from a time when everyone was expected to have an opinion on everything. It's hard to turn that off.
I'd say it's for the same reason that I "support" north korean refugees not being sex slaves in China. Or I support african children not getting malaria. In fact essentially no world affair news truly ever relates to me directly, not even news in my own country. Having opinions on global news is something on the level of a hobby, it serves to be more interesting in conversation.
The moral argument from the Zionist position here is that you can't see or hear the screaming Palestinian children dying a slow agonizing death whilst the concrete wall they are trapped under slowly grinds their pelvis to a mush. But you can see the videos of Israeli people captured and that has a more immediate pull on your heartstrings so that's where we draw the line.
This is not an uncharitable argument or a strawman. The actual argument is 'look at our propaganda and feel with us'. Any objective look at numbers tells us the story that jews in Israel have been massively overrepresenting the threat they face compared to any other integration issue facing the west. Be that black or Arab.
Any objective look at numbers tells us the story that jews in Israel have been massively overrepresenting the threat they face compared to any other integration issue facing the west.
Hamas's pathetic kd ratio isn't for lack of trying though, whereas I don't believe the dominant position in Israel is to kill as many Palestinians as possible. If Hamas got their hands on a nuclear weapon they would absolutely use it on Israel. That's the threat model.
And there are plenty of incompetent black criminals. What's your point? You don't think there are enough black people who hate white people in the US? There are plenty. If they got their hands on a nuclear weapon they would absolutely use it.
Considering the comments here and elsewhere, the only thing holding Israel back from doing their own little holocaust in Gaza is the international community of nations that don't like that sort of thing.
I think there is a different argument. When one bombs a target, one knows there may be collateral damage. When one purposefully attempts to kill a toddler, the death of the toddler isn’t a side effect.
I don't believe you or anyone else actually believes that the aim of Hamas is to kill jewish toddlers. I think you and everyone else recognizes the goals of Hamas are a little broader in scope than that and that any dead jewish toddlers are collateral damage on the road towards those broader goals.
How is it sophistry? Maybe the Palestinian’s goal in killing the toddler is to affect political change, but it’s also true that the Palestinian purposefully murdered a toddler. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t collateral damage. It was the target.
That is different from say bombing a military target that might cause collateral damage. The collateral damage isn’t the target; it is a side effect.
The goal is not to kill a toddler any more than the Israeli goal is to kill a toddler. The goal is as much to kill a toddler as the Israeli goal is to kill a toddler. The rest is sophistry.
This guy is changing the meaning of the phrase collateral damage. It would be like saying “my goal is to obtain 10k so killing the bank employee was merely collateral damage.”
Your argument is that when your side kills civilians its collateral damage and when the other guys kill civilians its evil barbarity. The rest is sophistry.
Seriously? Words have meanings and you don’t just get to change the meaning to support your antisemitism (yes — I saw your other post where you mentioned jewish pharmacists with opioids where the status of the pharmacists as Jews was beside the point).
Collateral damage results in non-military targets being incidentally killed as a result of a military strike on a military target. That’s different compared to targeting civilian targets and killing those targets despite there being zero military objective (but a political one). One might say “what does it matter — the dead are dead alike.” True but generally outcome is not the only matter determine the morality of an act.
When you designate civilian infrastructure as a military target you are just playing with words. The existence of 'collateral damage' as a term is completely meaningless in this context. It is only invoked as a self serving defense for when the ingroup kills civilians.
That applies fine to the grunts on the ground -- considering the leaders of Hamas, one could easily say there is no difference. After all, the fighters also attacked many legitimate military targets; when you let a bunch of armed fanatics loose on a population they've been trained to hate since birth, there's bound to be some 'collateral damage', they might say. (much as when you bomb a rocket emplacement in a city)
(also I remain interested to see where all this killing toddlers stuff is coming from -- it certainly seems like something Hamas people might do, but I've yet to see any actual documentation of it)
But they signed off on the operation? Why are we assuming that when a vast majority of the targets were civilian that Hamas leadership was only interested in legitimate military targets but grunts fucked it up? No the easier explanation is that what the grunts spent a majority of their time on is what the leadership desires (and amplified).
There's a particular image floating around of a car seat with a blood stain where the head would rest and next to it an infant dress with blood along the top half. And this news report. Of course Journalist reliability and the reliability of their sources is always a factor.
So I haven't seen the image, but that report is just what I'm talking about -- a literal carbon copy of WWI 'bayonetting babies' propaganda, accompanied by a picture of some bodies that clearly are not babies.
Source: Israeli intelligence agents reached out to a 2-bit freelancer, and she crosschecked some photos of the event. Which of course can't be shared. This tweet is clearly a fabrication, whether something like that happened or not.
I'm honestly a little conflicted about who I should support.
I don't understand how you can watch some of the videos that came out the last couple days and still feel this way. Raping someone to death and using their body as a trophy and then proudly releasing the video... makes it kind of an easy choice.
What confuses me; Is the hate I got for not putting certain political slogans in my twitter a few years ago... Where's all that outrage for actual atrocities against women? Why no feminist marches? Didn't people in Canada get their bank accounts frozen for donating to truckers honking loudly? Why is that apparatus not being applied here?
(Not the person you're replying to)
The issue is that I automatically diminish most of that evidence from my consideration, because things in that general seem expected based on past experience that states at war (and ideological war) with each other will come up with a bunch of legitimate recordings of the other side doing some crazy shit. These don't provide zero evidence, but they don't actually provide all that much
Ala https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/
I do have a position from looking around at various pieces of information, but just seeing the most-striking controversial videos would give you a confused look at the whole problem.
Perhaps because they were alive before last Saturday? It is not for nothing that people who actually spend serious attention on this conflict (and don't have certain affinity for one side) usually end up lament the evil done by both sides and shake their heads in despair.
The Arabs could have had another Arab state, but they declined the UN partition agreement and attacked Israel as soon as she was born - Israel won that war and expanded her territory. If Ukraine ousts Russia and takes a bit of Russian territory to boot would we blame them? The palestinians rejected a Clinton deal for a two state solution in 2000...they elected Hamas as soon as Israel withdrew from Gaza...I think the horrors of war are what we see from Israel, but the Palestinians commit actual terrorism.
I have not seen any rapes captured on video, but I did see a young woman's body piled upon a bunch of corpses in the back of a pickup being spat upon and laughed at by multiple individuals in a parade. That much is clear really happened, and I believe this to be the incident most are describing. Whether she was raped is unclear from my perspective but not really hard to imagine. Nonetheless they paraded her body around with no exaggeration.
but I did see a young woman's body piled upon a bunch of corpses in the back of a pickup being spat upon and laughed at by multiple individuals in a parade.
You did not see this. If you are referring to the video I think you're referring to, which people keep repeating as if it's not 1 data point. You are repeating headlines you read uncritically about a video that does not demonstrate what you said. Video (NSFW). Apparently 2 guys did spit, never noticed until now.
Her mom seems to have gotten some message from someone claiming to be (or maybe is, I don’t think it’s beyond question) Hamas or Hamas-associated saying she’s alive. The mother is clinging to hope, can’t fault her for that, but I doubt it.
Obviously it is possible someone with her visible injuries could survive with medical attention, and there are competent (largely volunteer) doctors and internationally funded hospitals in Gaza, but it really didn’t seem likely that the men in the trucks were on their way to drop her off at the hospital, to say the least.
Doubtful, it does look like her mom has some false hope tho.
It'd take a lot to keep someone with that many massive fractures in their legs from bleeding out internally - and in some of the video of her she has what looks like a gunshot wound to the head.
I think at least for me, the question is “what exactly are the Jews supposed to do here?” People love to criticize, but I don’t think any other groups would have as measured a response as Israel has to a group of people living within a stone’s throw of their major cities having a stated aim to kill them and wipe them off the map, and who regularly target civilians with rockets and bombs and terrorist attacks. If the native tribes of North America were regularly launching missiles from their reservations, we’d probably have a very similar response. If they do all the things Palestinians regularly do from Gaza, there’d be a wall, guards, and everything else.
We’re not thinking that way because for most of us, warfare, especially warfare of this type hasn’t happened in our countries for almost a century. It’s pretty easy to sit back and arm chair quarterback when war is something you only know from movies and that being too restrained is free for me in the USA who doesn’t have do worry about anyone you know suffering the consequences. When it’s your city, your people, and so on, anyone would tend to err on the side of protecting their own.
I think at least for me, the question is “what exactly are the Jews supposed to do here?”
The answer is a bit glib, but "build a wall along the 1947 border and withdraw behind it, accept Palestinian sovereignty over the other half and UN authority over Jerusalem and two border quadripoints" would at least mean that the overwhelming majority of accusations against Israel would no longer have a leg to stand on.
The problem is that without military control over Golan/West Bank, Israel is an incredibly indefensible country. Israel's leaders understandably don't trust the "World opinion" from protecting them from real armies. This is a good primer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ulHDsnhh_Cc
Palestinians then spend some time obtaining weapons, blow up said wall, attack again, Israel fights back and either we're back where we started with Israel occupying large portions of territory or Israel loses and is destroyed. A two-state solution can't work because the Palestinian state is never going to let off warring with the Israeli one. A one-state democracy where all are equal can't work because as soon as the Palestinians vote themselves in control of it they kill all the Jews.
The 1947 border is even less easily defensible, and as was seen earlier with the celebrations of ‘75 years of occupation’ (not 56), the Palestinians don’t really care about the UN borders anyway. That is, after all, what “from the river to the sea” means.
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2rafa 1yr ago
Who cares what Palestinians themselves think? If the overwhelming public opinion worldwide is "they've been given what they deserve, the UN deal is literally the most fair deal they could get" and then Palestinians democratically elect a government that claims the internationally recognized territory of Israel and tries to press the claim, Israel is free to pummel them into submission until they are willing to accept a peacekeeping mission with a High Representative with extraordinary powers like the one in BiH.
Palestinians democratically elect a government that claims the internationally recognized territory of Israel and tries to press the claim, Israel is free to pummel them into submission
I don’t see why we can’t just fast forward to exactly that happening and the exact situation as today’s repeating itself except with vastly more casualties on the Israeli side, large numbers of people displaced by fighting, huge economic damage etc.
To put things in perspective there have been more drug deaths due to a poorly secured border and a few predatory jewish pharmacutical companies than there have been jewish deaths at the hands of Palestinians by a ridiculous factor. On top of that, prior to this event there were even more European deaths at the hands of Arab terrorists than there were jewish ones.
I think jews all around the world have a very keen understanding of exactly who is in and who is out. What you are supposed to do is apologize for your jewish privilege and do better. Accept more immigration, do more for assimilation and focus heavily on functional integration. Of course no one will do that when it's their own ingroup at stake. No one will entertain some well reasoned and rationalized argument regarding the benefits of integration, diversity and rehabilitation. Just look at the rhetoric, 'they are raping our women!'.
This is an open invitation to leverage every single anti-ethnocentric argument against jews. Never again will I have to entertain a Zionist, jew or otherwise, when they start whining about the far right or anything similar. Black on white crime in the US alone dwarfs this conflict. You have an enemy at the gates? Open up and apologize for having gates you racists.
Yeah. One year is 500 black on white murders. How many Israelis die annually due to a direct Palestinian act? 20? If we factor in rapes this isn't even close.
To put that in perspective there are no state run military programs that try to avenge the loss of white lives. It's just contextualized as a national problem. A 'race issue'. If white people had only done more these white lives would not have been lost at the hands of blacks. Why can't jews just do that? Why do they have to be so ethnonationalist and hateful? We're all one race the human race. Say no to artificial borders and just let them in.
To put that in perspective there are no state run military programs that try to avenge the loss of white lives
The data clearly show that whites pose a much greater threat to white lives than do blacks. So, I assume you support a state-run military program against whites? And, of course, there are all the black victims who are killed by black perpetrators. I assume you support a state-run military program to avenge those victims? (I kid, of course, since I actually assume that you don't).
But, of course, your entire premise is bogus, because we do have state-run programs to avenge murders, and other crimes, as incarceration numbers clearly show.
The data clearly show that whites pose a much greater threat to white lives than do blacks. So, I assume you support a state-run military program against whites
No, just like Israel doesn't count the jews killed by other jews wrt the conflict with Palestine. You are only 'kidding' yourself by being this obtuse.
Now, did I answer your question or are you still going to pretend that 20 = 500? Or that Palestinians are raping as many jewish women as blacks rape white women?
No, just like Israel doesn't count the jews killed by other jews wrt the conflict with Palestine
I don't understand the relevance, unless you think there is some sort of race war going on in the US.
are you still going to pretend that 20 = 500
No, I but I am going to "pretend" that 1200>500. I am also going to "pretend" that 1200 people in a country of 10 million is equivalent to 42,000 in a country of 350 million.
There's just as much a race war in the US as there is a Palestinian conflict. Either we are one race the human race with artificial borders or we are ethnic groups. I am not entertaining tactical nazism for jews only.
No, I but I am going to "pretend" that 1200>500.
1200 in one anomaly year. It gets dwarfed by 3 average US years. We are still not counting the rapes.
I am also going to "pretend" that 1200 people in a country of 10 million is equivalent to 42,000 in a country of 350 million.
Except it's not. If the Israeli government was forcibly making Palestinians live within Israel whilst actively stoking pro-Palestinian grievance narratives I'm sure we could bump these numbers up. Which still leaves us with the drug epidemic. How many neighborhoods should the US turn into 'parking lots' because of the Sackler's?
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank
The two state solution would never have worked. At most, there could be a 3 state solution, but that requires buy in, not just from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, but also Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. The latter 3 don't want anything to do with Palestinians because they are destabilizing economic black holes even when not in their own self governed areas. Not even to touch on the fact that the PLO sabotaged a real peace agreement when they had an ole liberal Ehud Barak to negotiate with.
The arabs could have taken a two state solution in the original partition - they decided to attack the new nation of Israel instead. They could have had two states in 2000 with Clinton helping - nope, turned that down. They could have elected someone to help them build Gaza into something great, nope elected literal Nazi sympathizers who want to do a genocide. I mean, at some point, what can you do?
See also: responses to the cutesy infographics about how Israelis are killing sooooo many more Palestinians. There is a huge difference, and it has something to do with the Iron Dome.
The pro-Palestine response is that Israel shouldn’t be there. Not in Gaza, not in the West Bank, and perhaps not in the Middle East at all. If they were to pack up and leave Jerusalem to its previous owners, Hamas would have no need to commit mass murders.
This is about as reasonable as the people suggesting Palestinians could avoid having their buildings flattened by taking the L and moving to Egypt. That is, it overlooks the strategic difficulty, let alone the ideological reasons to stay and fight it out.
If the native tribes of North America were regularly launching missiles from their reservations, we’d probably have a very similar response.
"We" did have a similar response. Many colonists considered the Native Americans to be so barbaric that they "forfeited all claim to the rights of humanity" and that "their total extirpation" would be "scarce sufficient attonement" [1].
Similar case in Ireland back when the Pale around Dublin was subject to raids from Gaelic war bands. The genocidal rhetoric toned down a lot post-Cromwell (though Social Darwinism reignited it amongst some important players).
As I understand it, the Comanche basically lived by the sword and died by the sword. Whatever we did to them, I am fairly sure that if the shoe was on the other foot it would not have been much better.
where it says that 3,208 Palestinian civilians have died from 2008 to 2020 (compared to 177 Israeli civilians over the same period),
That's the same thing I pointed out a couple of days ago. The fact that more Palestinians were killed doesn't mean that Israel has been more aggressive. It just means that that Israel's defenses work better. Counting deaths this way is a bizarre standard which implies that the more you successfully prevent people on your own side from getting killed, the more immoral you are.
Israel shouldn't lose points for preventing more Israelis from being killed and this making this comparison look bad.
You should provide a small discount to incentivise not proceeding forward with a criminal plan, even if your actions so far have already made you culpable (discounting where you are close to completely certain they were about to go through with it, someone arrested while firing a gun deserves the same punishment as someone who managed to land their shots as far as I'm concerned).
It's the same rationale behind not having the penalty for rape be the same as the one for rape follower by murder, so that rapists aren't strongly incentivise to forever silence their victims. Discount some, because most violent criminals are too dumb to follow incentives that aren't extremely obvious, but it'll help on the margins.
Given the way things are going, the Palestinians (or at least the Gazans) will be remembered as perennial losers who wanted to kill Jews more than they wanted to survive. They didn't have to be fucked. There is a direct line between their refusal to back down from maximalist goals of destroying Israel and their present fate of slow strangulation.
I'd be willing to bet that if the Palestinians had adopted Gandhi's strategy, there'd be a Palestinian state right now. But nonviolent resistance until your adversaries are humiliated into submission isn't glamorous as war to the knife against your hated enemies. Hell, if they pursued a more regular unconventional war focused on Israeli military targets they might be there. But as long as they continue to preferentially target Israeli civilians and as long as they continue to assert their intention to destroy Israel there's no way the Israelis will compromise. And every so often there will some harsh reminder to the international community as to why.
I'd be willing to bet that if the Palestinians had adopted Gandhi's strategy, there'd be a Palestinian state right now.
This idea might have worked, unfortunately for them it is bad for leadership. Both Gaza and West Bank get lots of NGO and international aid money, which makes local leaders rich, while doing little for the populace. The only real path forward towards peace is an international agreement to totally isolate the two regions and provide no aid, no matter how much they claim to be in need.
That would be a step up from their current circumstances.
And also, probably yes. Levantine Singapore is probably too much to expect, but they're directly adjacent to Israel, a developed economy with a high GDP. In an alternate universe where they're not at war with Israel, they stand to benefit as a source of cheap manufacturing/labor.
I mean the West Bank is also a shithole that’s pretty bad by regional standards(although a lot better than Gaza) and they seem to mostly have rolled over.
Persisting despite seeing no sign of victory was a prerequisite for many currently extant nations. Total genocide excluded, a pragmatic acceptance of your own conquest can risk the extinction of your tribe more than the martyrdom of your current generation.
They're fucked, and I think there's something noble in fighting until you're wiped from the Earth by your enemy.
About 20% of Israel's citizens are Palestinian. The people dying in Hamas-controlled "Palestine" are primarily those who chose (or whose families chose) to fight a never-ending war against the presence of Jews in Israel. If Israel were to kill every single Palestinian in Gaza and the West bank, there would still be Palestinians, and there would still be a great many Arab states, with hundreds of millions of people living in them. If Hamas were to kill every Jew in Israel (about 7 million), this would bring an end to the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, the only Jewish nation in the world, and very nearly cut in half the total number of Jews alive in the world today. By contrast, there are about 1.5 million Palestinians in Israel, 6 million in other Arab countries, and 700,000 in other countries.
Not that either group is really a plausibly endangered minority; there are fewer Danes (5 million), and only very slightly more Native Americans (~10 million). But the Jews, in short, are far closer to being "wiped from the Earth by [their] enemy" than Palestinians, much less Arabs (which Palestinians, ultimately, are--along with 450 million others).
A tangent, but the "Native American population" by self-identification has never been higher. At 10 million, it is more than double the pre-Columbian population of the United States. It has grown by a factor of 30 since 1950, at an incredible rate of nearly 5% per year, which is far greater than even the Amish.
With such a large and growing population, I expect ever more battles to obtain special carve-outs and privileges. I also expect more people to repudiate their majority European DNA in an effort to claim these privileges for themselves.
I am not particularly informed about this topic, and nor am I American, but are these genuine cases?
Most "Native Americans" I come across on Social media are a bunch of functionally white women making noises about feeling under represented. I often find out that they have a a native great grandmother from a poor financial background who married a well off white man and had kids who were raised white.
So, based on what I said above it is no surprise that I find their claims weak and superficial, the tiny bits of Native American cultural practices they perform in the name of reconnecting with their roots more close to putting on the stereotypical feathered Native American costume than genuine practice. And I find it hard to believe anyone would believe the spin.
Now, I am biased by Social media which often platforms performative hacks over genuine products, so I may be way way off on this.
I am not particularly informed about this topic, and nor am I American, but are these genuine cases?
No. Full blooded native Americans exist, but there’s probably less than a million of them and almost none of them are Cherokee or whatever other tribe is popular to claim membership with.
An easy test is to ask if a ‘native American’ is an actual member of a federally recognized tribe- all of them require blood quanta.
A lot of them live on reservations and are impoverished, which is a great context for maximizing birth rates. They have nothing better or more appealing to do than breed. No career prospects to sacrifice fertility for, no Molochian god of GDP maximization to care about, just civilizationally robust cigarettes and booze.
The native birth rate in Canada is 2.2, dipping to 1.4 for those not living on reservations and climbing to 2.5+ for those on reservations, compared to the overall Canadian birthrate of 1.4.
A tangent, but the "Native American population" by self-identification has never been higher.
It is a tangent, but Palestinians and Native Americans have a lot in common, geopolitically. For example, in my experience there tends to be a lot of talk about the "ongoing genocide" against both groups, which are growing and have never been larger. That's a remarkable accomplishment in the face of "ongoing genocide!" To say nothing of their selective endorsement of ethnonationalism and feudal notion of binds between blood and land, but only for non-whites...
I also expect more people to repudiate their majority European DNA in an effort to claim these privileges for themselves.
This process is well underway. The so-called "civil rights movement" transformed racialism from a legal and social liability to a legal and social advantage. For those who lack a plausible race claim, novel takes on sex and sexuality offer an alternative. And yet in most places I've seen this pointed out, someone inevitably trots out the strawman: "you think someone would just choose to belong to an oppressed minority? Hah!"
Except that's exactly what the numbers seem to be telling us. People follow the incentives, and flee the costs. We've incentivized fracture and factionalism, so fracture and factionalism is what we are getting.
I think you are significantly downplaying the motivations for Civil Rights. African-Americans were literally born into their oppressed minority status. Of course they weren’t choosing it. This is the motte behind the entire edifice—that fundamentally, a significant number of Americans were deprived of their rights purely on the basis of their birth. By all means, argue against the bailey of self-identification. It’s much harder to assume away the fight against segregated buildings, voter suppression, blatant disregard for the word and spirit of the Constitution.
I think you are significantly downplaying the motivations for Civil Rights.
I think maybe you misunderstand my criticism. Most sources suggest the civil rights movement spans the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. You are correct that, during that time, a lot of people were motivated by genuine infringement on their genuinely civil rights. The story of desegregation is the one that is most often retold because it is, I suspect, the clearest case: state actors harming citizens by violating their rights directly, and state laws explicitly requiring private individuals and companies to impose racial apartheid whether they wanted to or not. But "affirmative action"--preferential treatment on the basis of race--was also demanded early and often.
I do not think preferential treatment is a civil right--to the contrary. And so almost from its very inception the movement was deeply self-contradictory. And maybe that would have been okay, but--slowly at first, and accelerating through the end of the 20th century--the demand for preferential treatment for black Americans became, by far, the most important, visible, influential, and imitated aspect of the civil rights movement as it extended beyond the goal of ending the oppression of blacks. Consider: segregation, voter suppression, and the like was limited to a handful of places, but affirmative action was not! Today, racial minorities demand segregation with some regularity. Fewer than 3/5ths of black voters bother to show up at the polls. So what is the true and lasting legacy of the civil rights movement, then, if not preferential treatment--which is not a civil right?
I think the civil rights movement changed American culture for the better in some ways--more in some parts of America than others. Abolishing state-mandated segregation was, on my view, purely good. State-mandated segregation was a huge and serious violation of many rights I regard civil. But the people to my political left do not appear to agree with me about that, not anymore, and they definitely advocate for preferential treatment for groups they regard as political allies. These are the people who most often claim to be the inheritors of the civil rights movement, and they appear to me the people most opposed to genuine civil rights.
If by "civil rights movement" you just mean Martin Luther King, Jr., then sure, I can drop the "so-called." But I'm not sure how to extend the motte and bailey metaphor when the people in the bailey clearly regard themselves as holding the motte.
My question to you is whether the Palestinians in the West Bank suffer similar privations during the time period. If not, does that not explain that perhaps Israel isn’t the bad party with Hamas?
Hamas also does put military targets next to civilian targets purposively.
The West Bank is richer than Gaza, but they're both still pretty poor in comparison. With far-right Israelis calling for its annexation and the settler issues, I can see why it's not much of a model in the minds of some Palestinians. Of course, I don't know what other model they have or could conceivably have.
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Notes -
I've seen a few people wonder why some people support Palestine in this conflict. While videos like this one (which predates the current conflict) are undoubtedly propaganda, they do offer a window into the worldview of a person who supports Palestine.
I'm honestly a little conflicted about who I should support. I condemn the killing of civilians by Hamas last weekend, but then I see United Nations OCHA data like this, where it says that 3,208 Palestinian civilians have died from 2008 to 2020 (compared to 177 Israeli civilians over the same period), mostly from air-launched explosions. I see people talking about supporting "the Jewish state’s justified but often brutal response", which so far includes blowing up a Palestinian house full of civilians with no warning, killing those inside, blowing up marketplaces and mosques, and attacking the Jabalia refugee camp.
Wikipedia claims that 40% of male Palestinians have spent some time in an Israeli prison. I hear about Israel demolishing 55,000 Palestinian structures as of 2022. I remember that Gaza had been blockaded by Egypt and Israel since 2005, despite Israel supposedly backing out of Gaza.
Even if every example of Israelis killing Palestinian civilians was collateral damage or accident, even if we assume that the cameras showing Israeli brutality always start rolling at the perfect moment to make it look like unnecessary brutality on their part, it's obvious to me that Palestine won't be able to grow under its current conditions of occupation. If the United States supports Israel, then Israel will prevail and Palestine will lose little by little every year. It will be a slow motion catastrophe, and there is nothing Palestine can do about it.
Is national, regional and global stability worth anything to the Palestinian people under such conditions? No wonder people are posting music videos in this thread of Palestinians with pipe dreams of Russia becoming a global super power again, and supporting Palestine to spite the United States. They're fucked, and I think there's something noble in fighting until you're wiped from the Earth by your enemy. Even if history remembers you as a monster, they will remember you.
You don’t have to choose a side, actually. You’re an American, presumably, you live far away and have no way of knowing.
If I had to advocate for my side, though, I’d say this - in 2005, when Israel unilaterally left Gaza, the gazans could have simply chose to declare a new state and live their lives. They could have been a middle-eastern Singapore. Instead, they chose to eliminate all of the PA’s presence in the strip (by throwing PA officials from high-rises, if memory serves) and double-down on rocketry. I think that says a lot. (Also, numerous other atrocities and the fact that post ‘48 there was a mixed Jewish-Arab side of the armistice line, and another judenfrei side)
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So your POV is we should reward incompetence and punish competence at preserving the lives of one's people?
The conflict is so simple it is silly. Israel always gets attacked. Whether its in 1973 or 2023. Its response is always measured, because it fears a backlash from the international community (correctly, because its mostly antisemites) if they execute the proper response, and thus the whole world is impoverished.
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The allies did terrible things in WWII, firebombing Dresden and killing many, many civilians. Does that mean that the Axis and the Allies were morally equivalent sides?
Hamas hides their bases inside hospitals and schools and apartment buildings. Israel cannot just let Hamas continue to fire rockets at them - so they retaliate, but because Hamas hides in civilian areas those civilians become casualties of war. This is very different from IDF soldiers going into Gaza, raping and killing Palestinian women and then parading their bodies around to cheers of "god is great" from fellow Israelis - which is what Hamas has video'd itself doing. Hamas is an islamist organization that wants to help build a global caliphate and genocide all Jews everywhere. It's easy to "pick a side"
I’d add the terrorists published the video and in the Gaza community were celebrated; not condemned for their barbarism.
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This might sound a little glib but it's an honest question: Why do you feel compelled to support either side, here, or even to have an opinion on the matter at all? Seems to me that something's been snuck into the process such that the question is being begged. But should this be the case?
I really enjoyed Bo Burhnam's Inside (wait, not like that...) and he had a monologue that touched on this very issue. Transcript (though I recommend listening/watching the video):
It seems to have peaked during the Floyd riots, but we're still recovering from a time when everyone was expected to have an opinion on everything. It's hard to turn that off.
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I'd say it's for the same reason that I "support" north korean refugees not being sex slaves in China. Or I support african children not getting malaria. In fact essentially no world affair news truly ever relates to me directly, not even news in my own country. Having opinions on global news is something on the level of a hobby, it serves to be more interesting in conversation.
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The moral argument from the Zionist position here is that you can't see or hear the screaming Palestinian children dying a slow agonizing death whilst the concrete wall they are trapped under slowly grinds their pelvis to a mush. But you can see the videos of Israeli people captured and that has a more immediate pull on your heartstrings so that's where we draw the line.
This is not an uncharitable argument or a strawman. The actual argument is 'look at our propaganda and feel with us'. Any objective look at numbers tells us the story that jews in Israel have been massively overrepresenting the threat they face compared to any other integration issue facing the west. Be that black or Arab.
Hamas's pathetic kd ratio isn't for lack of trying though, whereas I don't believe the dominant position in Israel is to kill as many Palestinians as possible. If Hamas got their hands on a nuclear weapon they would absolutely use it on Israel. That's the threat model.
And there are plenty of incompetent black criminals. What's your point? You don't think there are enough black people who hate white people in the US? There are plenty. If they got their hands on a nuclear weapon they would absolutely use it.
Considering the comments here and elsewhere, the only thing holding Israel back from doing their own little holocaust in Gaza is the international community of nations that don't like that sort of thing.
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I think there is a different argument. When one bombs a target, one knows there may be collateral damage. When one purposefully attempts to kill a toddler, the death of the toddler isn’t a side effect.
This is just sophistry.
I don't believe you or anyone else actually believes that the aim of Hamas is to kill jewish toddlers. I think you and everyone else recognizes the goals of Hamas are a little broader in scope than that and that any dead jewish toddlers are collateral damage on the road towards those broader goals.
How is it sophistry? Maybe the Palestinian’s goal in killing the toddler is to affect political change, but it’s also true that the Palestinian purposefully murdered a toddler. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t collateral damage. It was the target.
That is different from say bombing a military target that might cause collateral damage. The collateral damage isn’t the target; it is a side effect.
The goal is not to kill a toddler any more than the Israeli goal is to kill a toddler. The goal is as much to kill a toddler as the Israeli goal is to kill a toddler. The rest is sophistry.
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Indeed, they want all the Jews dead, not just the toddlers.
Not collateral damage, just a low-priority target.
Really? Never seen that as a stated goal from them. Are you sure it's not just 'boo-outgroup'?
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This guy is changing the meaning of the phrase collateral damage. It would be like saying “my goal is to obtain 10k so killing the bank employee was merely collateral damage.”
No one uses collateral damage in that way.
Your argument is that when your side kills civilians its collateral damage and when the other guys kill civilians its evil barbarity. The rest is sophistry.
Seriously? Words have meanings and you don’t just get to change the meaning to support your antisemitism (yes — I saw your other post where you mentioned jewish pharmacists with opioids where the status of the pharmacists as Jews was beside the point).
Collateral damage results in non-military targets being incidentally killed as a result of a military strike on a military target. That’s different compared to targeting civilian targets and killing those targets despite there being zero military objective (but a political one). One might say “what does it matter — the dead are dead alike.” True but generally outcome is not the only matter determine the morality of an act.
When you designate civilian infrastructure as a military target you are just playing with words. The existence of 'collateral damage' as a term is completely meaningless in this context. It is only invoked as a self serving defense for when the ingroup kills civilians.
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That applies fine to the grunts on the ground -- considering the leaders of Hamas, one could easily say there is no difference. After all, the fighters also attacked many legitimate military targets; when you let a bunch of armed fanatics loose on a population they've been trained to hate since birth, there's bound to be some 'collateral damage', they might say. (much as when you bomb a rocket emplacement in a city)
(also I remain interested to see where all this killing toddlers stuff is coming from -- it certainly seems like something Hamas people might do, but I've yet to see any actual documentation of it)
So when they used hang gliders to attack a musical festival that was just the grunts?
Probably not whoever's in charge of Hamas doing it personally?
But they signed off on the operation? Why are we assuming that when a vast majority of the targets were civilian that Hamas leadership was only interested in legitimate military targets but grunts fucked it up? No the easier explanation is that what the grunts spent a majority of their time on is what the leadership desires (and amplified).
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There's a particular image floating around of a car seat with a blood stain where the head would rest and next to it an infant dress with blood along the top half. And this news report. Of course Journalist reliability and the reliability of their sources is always a factor.
So I haven't seen the image, but that report is just what I'm talking about -- a literal carbon copy of WWI 'bayonetting babies' propaganda, accompanied by a picture of some bodies that clearly are not babies.
Source: Israeli intelligence agents reached out to a 2-bit freelancer, and she crosschecked some photos of the event. Which of course can't be shared. This tweet is clearly a fabrication, whether something like that happened or not.
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I don't understand how you can watch some of the videos that came out the last couple days and still feel this way. Raping someone to death and using their body as a trophy and then proudly releasing the video... makes it kind of an easy choice.
What confuses me; Is the hate I got for not putting certain political slogans in my twitter a few years ago... Where's all that outrage for actual atrocities against women? Why no feminist marches? Didn't people in Canada get their bank accounts frozen for donating to truckers honking loudly? Why is that apparatus not being applied here?
(Not the person you're replying to) The issue is that I automatically diminish most of that evidence from my consideration, because things in that general seem expected based on past experience that states at war (and ideological war) with each other will come up with a bunch of legitimate recordings of the other side doing some crazy shit. These don't provide zero evidence, but they don't actually provide all that much Ala https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/
I do have a position from looking around at various pieces of information, but just seeing the most-striking controversial videos would give you a confused look at the whole problem.
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Perhaps because they were alive before last Saturday? It is not for nothing that people who actually spend serious attention on this conflict (and don't have certain affinity for one side) usually end up lament the evil done by both sides and shake their heads in despair.
The Arabs could have had another Arab state, but they declined the UN partition agreement and attacked Israel as soon as she was born - Israel won that war and expanded her territory. If Ukraine ousts Russia and takes a bit of Russian territory to boot would we blame them? The palestinians rejected a Clinton deal for a two state solution in 2000...they elected Hamas as soon as Israel withdrew from Gaza...I think the horrors of war are what we see from Israel, but the Palestinians commit actual terrorism.
Such a miraculous thing, states being "born". With totally no other context behind the event. Land of virgin births indeed.
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I've seen no evidence that this happened. Have you?
I have not seen any rapes captured on video, but I did see a young woman's body piled upon a bunch of corpses in the back of a pickup being spat upon and laughed at by multiple individuals in a parade. That much is clear really happened, and I believe this to be the incident most are describing. Whether she was raped is unclear from my perspective but not really hard to imagine. Nonetheless they paraded her body around with no exaggeration.
You did not see this. If you are referring to the video I think you're referring to, which people keep repeating as if it's not 1 data point. You are repeating headlines you read uncritically about a video that does not demonstrate what you said. Video (NSFW). Apparently 2 guys did spit, never noticed until now.
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Looks like she's alive now.
That seems shocking to me. That was the kind of scene I did not think people came back from.
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Her mom seems to have gotten some message from someone claiming to be (or maybe is, I don’t think it’s beyond question) Hamas or Hamas-associated saying she’s alive. The mother is clinging to hope, can’t fault her for that, but I doubt it.
Obviously it is possible someone with her visible injuries could survive with medical attention, and there are competent (largely volunteer) doctors and internationally funded hospitals in Gaza, but it really didn’t seem likely that the men in the trucks were on their way to drop her off at the hospital, to say the least.
With the worldwide exposure and she would make a good hostage that's for sure. I agree though, I think hope she's alive is slim.
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Doubtful, it does look like her mom has some false hope tho.
It'd take a lot to keep someone with that many massive fractures in their legs from bleeding out internally - and in some of the video of her she has what looks like a gunshot wound to the head.
Tourniquets can work. IF she is conscious when she reaches modern medical care AND she just has the fractures in her legs she can probably be saved.
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I think at least for me, the question is “what exactly are the Jews supposed to do here?” People love to criticize, but I don’t think any other groups would have as measured a response as Israel has to a group of people living within a stone’s throw of their major cities having a stated aim to kill them and wipe them off the map, and who regularly target civilians with rockets and bombs and terrorist attacks. If the native tribes of North America were regularly launching missiles from their reservations, we’d probably have a very similar response. If they do all the things Palestinians regularly do from Gaza, there’d be a wall, guards, and everything else.
We’re not thinking that way because for most of us, warfare, especially warfare of this type hasn’t happened in our countries for almost a century. It’s pretty easy to sit back and arm chair quarterback when war is something you only know from movies and that being too restrained is free for me in the USA who doesn’t have do worry about anyone you know suffering the consequences. When it’s your city, your people, and so on, anyone would tend to err on the side of protecting their own.
The answer is a bit glib, but "build a wall along the 1947 border and withdraw behind it, accept Palestinian sovereignty over the other half and UN authority over Jerusalem and two border quadripoints" would at least mean that the overwhelming majority of accusations against Israel would no longer have a leg to stand on.
The problem is that without military control over Golan/West Bank, Israel is an incredibly indefensible country. Israel's leaders understandably don't trust the "World opinion" from protecting them from real armies. This is a good primer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ulHDsnhh_Cc
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Palestinians then spend some time obtaining weapons, blow up said wall, attack again, Israel fights back and either we're back where we started with Israel occupying large portions of territory or Israel loses and is destroyed. A two-state solution can't work because the Palestinian state is never going to let off warring with the Israeli one. A one-state democracy where all are equal can't work because as soon as the Palestinians vote themselves in control of it they kill all the Jews.
Well yeah, Israel is pretty much Fitzcarraldo. It should never have existed.
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The 1947 border is even less easily defensible, and as was seen earlier with the celebrations of ‘75 years of occupation’ (not 56), the Palestinians don’t really care about the UN borders anyway. That is, after all, what “from the river to the sea” means.
Who cares what Palestinians themselves think? If the overwhelming public opinion worldwide is "they've been given what they deserve, the UN deal is literally the most fair deal they could get" and then Palestinians democratically elect a government that claims the internationally recognized territory of Israel and tries to press the claim, Israel is free to pummel them into submission until they are willing to accept a peacekeeping mission with a High Representative with extraordinary powers like the one in BiH.
That's the current situation with cosmetic changes.
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I don’t see why we can’t just fast forward to exactly that happening and the exact situation as today’s repeating itself except with vastly more casualties on the Israeli side, large numbers of people displaced by fighting, huge economic damage etc.
Well, withdrawing from Palestine while immediately being replaced with a BiH-style peacekeeping force could work as well.
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To put things in perspective there have been more drug deaths due to a poorly secured border and a few predatory jewish pharmacutical companies than there have been jewish deaths at the hands of Palestinians by a ridiculous factor. On top of that, prior to this event there were even more European deaths at the hands of Arab terrorists than there were jewish ones.
I think jews all around the world have a very keen understanding of exactly who is in and who is out. What you are supposed to do is apologize for your jewish privilege and do better. Accept more immigration, do more for assimilation and focus heavily on functional integration. Of course no one will do that when it's their own ingroup at stake. No one will entertain some well reasoned and rationalized argument regarding the benefits of integration, diversity and rehabilitation. Just look at the rhetoric, 'they are raping our women!'.
This is an open invitation to leverage every single anti-ethnocentric argument against jews. Never again will I have to entertain a Zionist, jew or otherwise, when they start whining about the far right or anything similar. Black on white crime in the US alone dwarfs this conflict. You have an enemy at the gates? Open up and apologize for having gates you racists.
Does it?
Yeah. One year is 500 black on white murders. How many Israelis die annually due to a direct Palestinian act? 20? If we factor in rapes this isn't even close.
To put that in perspective there are no state run military programs that try to avenge the loss of white lives. It's just contextualized as a national problem. A 'race issue'. If white people had only done more these white lives would not have been lost at the hands of blacks. Why can't jews just do that? Why do they have to be so ethnonationalist and hateful? We're all one race the human race. Say no to artificial borders and just let them in.
The data clearly show that whites pose a much greater threat to white lives than do blacks. So, I assume you support a state-run military program against whites? And, of course, there are all the black victims who are killed by black perpetrators. I assume you support a state-run military program to avenge those victims? (I kid, of course, since I actually assume that you don't).
But, of course, your entire premise is bogus, because we do have state-run programs to avenge murders, and other crimes, as incarceration numbers clearly show.
No, just like Israel doesn't count the jews killed by other jews wrt the conflict with Palestine. You are only 'kidding' yourself by being this obtuse.
Now, did I answer your question or are you still going to pretend that 20 = 500? Or that Palestinians are raping as many jewish women as blacks rape white women?
I don't understand the relevance, unless you think there is some sort of race war going on in the US.
No, I but I am going to "pretend" that 1200>500. I am also going to "pretend" that 1200 people in a country of 10 million is equivalent to 42,000 in a country of 350 million.
There's just as much a race war in the US as there is a Palestinian conflict. Either we are one race the human race with artificial borders or we are ethnic groups. I am not entertaining tactical nazism for jews only.
1200 in one anomaly year. It gets dwarfed by 3 average US years. We are still not counting the rapes.
Except it's not. If the Israeli government was forcibly making Palestinians live within Israel whilst actively stoking pro-Palestinian grievance narratives I'm sure we could bump these numbers up. Which still leaves us with the drug epidemic. How many neighborhoods should the US turn into 'parking lots' because of the Sackler's?
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they could have genuinely pursued a two state solution instead of using hamas to cripple the idea of palestinian statehood.
The two state solution would never have worked. At most, there could be a 3 state solution, but that requires buy in, not just from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, but also Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. The latter 3 don't want anything to do with Palestinians because they are destabilizing economic black holes even when not in their own self governed areas. Not even to touch on the fact that the PLO sabotaged a real peace agreement when they had an ole liberal Ehud Barak to negotiate with.
HBD in action. No wants the Palestinians in Gaza since they as a group produce negative marginal value.
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The arabs could have taken a two state solution in the original partition - they decided to attack the new nation of Israel instead. They could have had two states in 2000 with Clinton helping - nope, turned that down. They could have elected someone to help them build Gaza into something great, nope elected literal Nazi sympathizers who want to do a genocide. I mean, at some point, what can you do?
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Israel tried for that multiple times, Palestine has turned it down every time.
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It looks like mostly peaceful protests against policy brutality to me.
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See also: responses to the cutesy infographics about how Israelis are killing sooooo many more Palestinians. There is a huge difference, and it has something to do with the Iron Dome.
The pro-Palestine response is that Israel shouldn’t be there. Not in Gaza, not in the West Bank, and perhaps not in the Middle East at all. If they were to pack up and leave Jerusalem to its previous owners, Hamas would have no need to commit mass murders.
This is about as reasonable as the people suggesting Palestinians could avoid having their buildings flattened by taking the L and moving to Egypt. That is, it overlooks the strategic difficulty, let alone the ideological reasons to stay and fight it out.
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"We" did have a similar response. Many colonists considered the Native Americans to be so barbaric that they "forfeited all claim to the rights of humanity" and that "their total extirpation" would be "scarce sufficient attonement" [1].
Similar case in Ireland back when the Pale around Dublin was subject to raids from Gaelic war bands. The genocidal rhetoric toned down a lot post-Cromwell (though Social Darwinism reignited it amongst some important players).
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The Comanche and Apache, at the very least, felt the same way about the Americans, and other tribes, and behaved accordingly.
As I understand it, the Comanche basically lived by the sword and died by the sword. Whatever we did to them, I am fairly sure that if the shoe was on the other foot it would not have been much better.
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That's the same thing I pointed out a couple of days ago. The fact that more Palestinians were killed doesn't mean that Israel has been more aggressive. It just means that that Israel's defenses work better. Counting deaths this way is a bizarre standard which implies that the more you successfully prevent people on your own side from getting killed, the more immoral you are.
Israel shouldn't lose points for preventing more Israelis from being killed and this making this comparison look bad.
How do you feel about the sentencing for murder being different from the sentencing for conspiracy?
I don't think the sentencing for self-defense should be any greater than the sentencing for conspiracy to commit self-defense.
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You should provide a small discount to incentivise not proceeding forward with a criminal plan, even if your actions so far have already made you culpable (discounting where you are close to completely certain they were about to go through with it, someone arrested while firing a gun deserves the same punishment as someone who managed to land their shots as far as I'm concerned).
It's the same rationale behind not having the penalty for rape be the same as the one for rape follower by murder, so that rapists aren't strongly incentivise to forever silence their victims. Discount some, because most violent criminals are too dumb to follow incentives that aren't extremely obvious, but it'll help on the margins.
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Given the way things are going, the Palestinians (or at least the Gazans) will be remembered as perennial losers who wanted to kill Jews more than they wanted to survive. They didn't have to be fucked. There is a direct line between their refusal to back down from maximalist goals of destroying Israel and their present fate of slow strangulation.
I'd be willing to bet that if the Palestinians had adopted Gandhi's strategy, there'd be a Palestinian state right now. But nonviolent resistance until your adversaries are humiliated into submission isn't glamorous as war to the knife against your hated enemies. Hell, if they pursued a more regular unconventional war focused on Israeli military targets they might be there. But as long as they continue to preferentially target Israeli civilians and as long as they continue to assert their intention to destroy Israel there's no way the Israelis will compromise. And every so often there will some harsh reminder to the international community as to why.
This idea might have worked, unfortunately for them it is bad for leadership. Both Gaza and West Bank get lots of NGO and international aid money, which makes local leaders rich, while doing little for the populace. The only real path forward towards peace is an international agreement to totally isolate the two regions and provide no aid, no matter how much they claim to be in need.
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Would Gaza be appreciably different from any other shithole in the region if they just rolled over and submitted?
That would be a step up from their current circumstances.
And also, probably yes. Levantine Singapore is probably too much to expect, but they're directly adjacent to Israel, a developed economy with a high GDP. In an alternate universe where they're not at war with Israel, they stand to benefit as a source of cheap manufacturing/labor.
They already are. Tens, if not hundreds if you include illegal employment, of thousands of Palestinians work in Israel or Israeli settlements.
Is that going to be as true next month as it was last month?
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I mean the West Bank is also a shithole that’s pretty bad by regional standards(although a lot better than Gaza) and they seem to mostly have rolled over.
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Exactly how I feel about the Ukrainians. They're not going to win against Russia. Their stubborn refusal is going to get them killed. It's irrational.
Persisting despite seeing no sign of victory was a prerequisite for many currently extant nations. Total genocide excluded, a pragmatic acceptance of your own conquest can risk the extinction of your tribe more than the martyrdom of your current generation.
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About 20% of Israel's citizens are Palestinian. The people dying in Hamas-controlled "Palestine" are primarily those who chose (or whose families chose) to fight a never-ending war against the presence of Jews in Israel. If Israel were to kill every single Palestinian in Gaza and the West bank, there would still be Palestinians, and there would still be a great many Arab states, with hundreds of millions of people living in them. If Hamas were to kill every Jew in Israel (about 7 million), this would bring an end to the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, the only Jewish nation in the world, and very nearly cut in half the total number of Jews alive in the world today. By contrast, there are about 1.5 million Palestinians in Israel, 6 million in other Arab countries, and 700,000 in other countries.
Not that either group is really a plausibly endangered minority; there are fewer Danes (5 million), and only very slightly more Native Americans (~10 million). But the Jews, in short, are far closer to being "wiped from the Earth by [their] enemy" than Palestinians, much less Arabs (which Palestinians, ultimately, are--along with 450 million others).
A tangent, but the "Native American population" by self-identification has never been higher. At 10 million, it is more than double the pre-Columbian population of the United States. It has grown by a factor of 30 since 1950, at an incredible rate of nearly 5% per year, which is far greater than even the Amish.
With such a large and growing population, I expect ever more battles to obtain special carve-outs and privileges. I also expect more people to repudiate their majority European DNA in an effort to claim these privileges for themselves.
I am not particularly informed about this topic, and nor am I American, but are these genuine cases?
Most "Native Americans" I come across on Social media are a bunch of functionally white women making noises about feeling under represented. I often find out that they have a a native great grandmother from a poor financial background who married a well off white man and had kids who were raised white.
So, based on what I said above it is no surprise that I find their claims weak and superficial, the tiny bits of Native American cultural practices they perform in the name of reconnecting with their roots more close to putting on the stereotypical feathered Native American costume than genuine practice. And I find it hard to believe anyone would believe the spin.
Now, I am biased by Social media which often platforms performative hacks over genuine products, so I may be way way off on this.
No. Full blooded native Americans exist, but there’s probably less than a million of them and almost none of them are Cherokee or whatever other tribe is popular to claim membership with.
An easy test is to ask if a ‘native American’ is an actual member of a federally recognized tribe- all of them require blood quanta.
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It must be. No way the actual Native American population is growing faster than the Amish.
A lot of them live on reservations and are impoverished, which is a great context for maximizing birth rates. They have nothing better or more appealing to do than breed. No career prospects to sacrifice fertility for, no Molochian god of GDP maximization to care about, just civilizationally robust cigarettes and booze.
Native American birth rate is about 2.1, which is near replacement levels.
The native birth rate in Canada is 2.2, dipping to 1.4 for those not living on reservations and climbing to 2.5+ for those on reservations, compared to the overall Canadian birthrate of 1.4.
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It is a tangent, but Palestinians and Native Americans have a lot in common, geopolitically. For example, in my experience there tends to be a lot of talk about the "ongoing genocide" against both groups, which are growing and have never been larger. That's a remarkable accomplishment in the face of "ongoing genocide!" To say nothing of their selective endorsement of ethnonationalism and feudal notion of binds between blood and land, but only for non-whites...
This process is well underway. The so-called "civil rights movement" transformed racialism from a legal and social liability to a legal and social advantage. For those who lack a plausible race claim, novel takes on sex and sexuality offer an alternative. And yet in most places I've seen this pointed out, someone inevitably trots out the strawman: "you think someone would just choose to belong to an oppressed minority? Hah!"
Except that's exactly what the numbers seem to be telling us. People follow the incentives, and flee the costs. We've incentivized fracture and factionalism, so fracture and factionalism is what we are getting.
“So-called”?
I think you are significantly downplaying the motivations for Civil Rights. African-Americans were literally born into their oppressed minority status. Of course they weren’t choosing it. This is the motte behind the entire edifice—that fundamentally, a significant number of Americans were deprived of their rights purely on the basis of their birth. By all means, argue against the bailey of self-identification. It’s much harder to assume away the fight against segregated buildings, voter suppression, blatant disregard for the word and spirit of the Constitution.
I think maybe you misunderstand my criticism. Most sources suggest the civil rights movement spans the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. You are correct that, during that time, a lot of people were motivated by genuine infringement on their genuinely civil rights. The story of desegregation is the one that is most often retold because it is, I suspect, the clearest case: state actors harming citizens by violating their rights directly, and state laws explicitly requiring private individuals and companies to impose racial apartheid whether they wanted to or not. But "affirmative action"--preferential treatment on the basis of race--was also demanded early and often.
I do not think preferential treatment is a civil right--to the contrary. And so almost from its very inception the movement was deeply self-contradictory. And maybe that would have been okay, but--slowly at first, and accelerating through the end of the 20th century--the demand for preferential treatment for black Americans became, by far, the most important, visible, influential, and imitated aspect of the civil rights movement as it extended beyond the goal of ending the oppression of blacks. Consider: segregation, voter suppression, and the like was limited to a handful of places, but affirmative action was not! Today, racial minorities demand segregation with some regularity. Fewer than 3/5ths of black voters bother to show up at the polls. So what is the true and lasting legacy of the civil rights movement, then, if not preferential treatment--which is not a civil right?
I think the civil rights movement changed American culture for the better in some ways--more in some parts of America than others. Abolishing state-mandated segregation was, on my view, purely good. State-mandated segregation was a huge and serious violation of many rights I regard civil. But the people to my political left do not appear to agree with me about that, not anymore, and they definitely advocate for preferential treatment for groups they regard as political allies. These are the people who most often claim to be the inheritors of the civil rights movement, and they appear to me the people most opposed to genuine civil rights.
If by "civil rights movement" you just mean Martin Luther King, Jr., then sure, I can drop the "so-called." But I'm not sure how to extend the motte and bailey metaphor when the people in the bailey clearly regard themselves as holding the motte.
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My question to you is whether the Palestinians in the West Bank suffer similar privations during the time period. If not, does that not explain that perhaps Israel isn’t the bad party with Hamas?
Hamas also does put military targets next to civilian targets purposively.
Israel is building settlements there, delegitimizing Fatah (who're supposed to be The Good Ones). One argument being made is that Netanyahu has been focused on the West Bank and the settlers to mollify his coalition partners and that's played a role here. Haaretz, as an example, blames attempts" to annex the West Bank" for rising tensions there before this attack
The West Bank is richer than Gaza, but they're both still pretty poor in comparison. With far-right Israelis calling for its annexation and the settler issues, I can see why it's not much of a model in the minds of some Palestinians. Of course, I don't know what other model they have or could conceivably have.
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