naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #3
This is a refreshed 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.
At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).
popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
The zionists are right. I don’t see any solution to this that doesn’t eventually look like a Zionism transposed to some other location. The historic record here is pretty clear — a stateless Jewish minority is going to be the target of either states looking for a scapegoat or angry mobs taking matters into their own hands. In most Muslim countries, non Muslims are second class citizens at best. So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere. If that’s the case, you need to create a continuous land area in which Jews are given complete control. And you’re now displacing whoever lives there now. It ends up looking almost exactly like Israel except now we’re building in South America or Montana or Wales or something. There aren’t really good answers.
So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere.
I feel like it is important to point out that however valid this argument may be, making it forever forecloses your ability to criticise Trump, the alt-right and white nationalists. Once you cross this line you lose the ethical and moral ground which allows you to say that white nationalism/ethnonationalism is bad at all. There simply aren't any real arguments for why the Jews need to be protected and get their own ethnostate that don't also apply to white or yellow people beyond blatant ethnic supremacy (that would sound something like "The Jews get to have their own nation because they're God's chosen people and above all others").
And while this is the motte and hence nobody cares that a pseudonymous Zensunni wanderer can't exactly condemn Trump anymore, these concerns become much bigger in the real world where people make political statements tied to their identity. All these public arguments, discussions and comments about what's happening are going to be remembered, and the left is famous for digging into people's past comments in order to discredit them in arguments so this isn't exactly a purely academic concern.
There simply aren't any real arguments for why the Jews need to be protected and get their own ethnostate that don't also apply to white or yellow people beyond blatant ethnic supremacy
That's not true. E.g. whites are much more numerous. It's not realistic to imagine that whites in the USA could suffer the same fate as Jews in Germany - there's too many of them.
White people are vanishingly small as a percentage of the total population on Earth, so all you're saying is that we just have to wait a bit longer before they can have their own ethnostate? Would you also support Israel ceasing to be an ethnostate once the jewish diaspora population gets a bit bigger? How you slice the salami matters a lot too - do the Boers get to have their own ethnostate, given that they are a tiny minority on the verge of being wiped out and far smaller in population than the jews? I'm struggling to see the actual principle here - "you only get an ethnostate if you could plausibly be wiped out" is a contradictory and self-defeating argument anyway because it means that the moment you have the ethnostate you're protected and hence no longer deserve it... and if the ethnostate DOESN'T protect you, then there's no point tying it to numbers like that.
I think each people group is well served to have at least one country where they are a majority. Whether or not a country exists for the explicit purpose of giving them a majority is pretty much immaterial. E.g. Egypt is not a country formed for the purpose of giving Arabs a state of their own, but it nonetheless functions perfectly well as an Arab-majority country, such that the establishment of an Arab ethnostate is unnecessary. Whites don't need an ethnostate because we already have the thing that an ethnostate would exist to give us. E.g. when white Zimbabweans were a persecuted minority, they had somewhere to flee to that opened the doors for them.
And yes, this does mean I would like the Boers to have their own land - ideally they would have beaten the British and the Orange Free State would have survived. Alas.
Whites don't need an ethnostate because we already have the thing that an ethnostate would exist to give us. E.g. when white Zimbabweans were a persecuted minority, they had somewhere to flee to that opened the doors for them.
Heterosexual white men are not protected from affirmative action (discrimination) in most of the West, so what is that elusive 'the thing that an ethnostate would give exist to give us'?
This makes me think that one way for Israel to resolve that Hamas conundrum would be to offer Palestinians female-only visas, scholarships and massive cash bonuses to study and work in Israel and elsewhere.
Something like what the Americans tried in Afghanistan but actually effective.
I think the poorly defined and murky phrase "people group" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. This position makes you a firm supporter of Kurdish nationalism and Catalan separatism, but it unfortunately doesn't actually do anything to give you the solid ground you need to actually condemn white nationalists. What exactly is it that makes Jews a "people group" worthy of their own apartheid regime and ethnostate? I don't think you've defined that clearly enough to avoid also endorsing white nationalism, and you have also opened yourself up to a bunch of really dumb borderline questions like whether the Scots-Irish population in the USA deserves their own homeland.
My rule is any group of people that constitutes a majority in a defined geographical area of a city or larger should be able to form their own state if they want to. The lines that separate us are arbitrary and malleable, if people choose to care about being Hispanic or Saxon or Catalan or Appalachians then so be it.
I'm not particularly invested in condemning white nationalism. I don't support it on an object level, but I don't see it as being somehow illegitimate for a country to decide its own immigration policy or whatever.
Jews get to have an ethnostate because they’ve been genocided several times. I don’t think that’s identical to other arguments. I’m not worried about other states wanting to have an ethnostate if they want one.
White people have also been genocided several times through history as well (European history is surprisingly brutal). They're still around, but if that's an argument against them getting an ethnostate then it also applies to the jews.
Honestly when you saw the riots in Paris and the marches and London maybe it isn’t unreasonable to keep France for the French or England for the English.
Personally I thought the Rotherham case was a far greater argument for keeping England for the English. I'm not even going to feign a lack of disgust at people who think protests in favour of Hamas are where the line was crossed as opposed to Rotherham (though to clarify I'm not accusing you of this right now).
There is no actual reason to suppose that if every Israeli Jew were granted the right to live in the US or Australia or the Netherlands or someplace, they would be vulnerable to scapegoating or pogroms. Sure, in Saudi they would, but granting Jews the right of return to Australia would not actually make them vulnerable to discrimination- they just wouldn't have their own country.
Australia is an immigration friendly place, but even so 7 million people all at once would be stretching the friendship a bit.
Edit: Also, we did just have a big crowd in Sydney chanting "gas the jews". Such people are an extreme fringe, but can anyone guarantee they will remain a fringe?
That was just an example, you know. No doubt a 1-state solution where the Palestinians are full citizens, backstopped by the CANZUK nations pledging to accept any Israeli Jewish immigrant who applies, would not result in a Jewish genocide(although it might well result in far fewer Jews in a generation as some of the conditions leading to a high Israeli-Jewish birthrate are probably unique to Israel).
The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return.
Yes, but anti-zionists get no credit for obvious impossibilities. "Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel with right of return and the Israeli Jews don't end up in a very bad place in a very short time" is such an impossibility.
It's not about giving credit, it's about understanding and engaging with what people actually believe. Saying they want to ethnically cleanse the jews just gets denial because it's not true, arguing that a one-state solution would inevitably result in ethnic cleansing might result in an actual conversation.
Furthermore unthinkingly dismissing "obvious impossibilities" is lazy thinking that tends to just make people slaves to their local overton window. There are plenty of people to whom it is obvious that historical opponents of racial integration were just racist villains with no motive besides hate, while simultaneously dismissing palestinian citizenship as an impossibility and never even considering that those historical figures might have had their own well-thought-out reasons. Take Thomas Jefferson's reasons for calling for slaves to emancipated but also deported:
It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others...
The point isn't that the situation with the palestinians is necessarily the same as those historical analogues. It is that actually considering the matter leads to understanding and perspective based on something better than what your social environment considers "obvious". If the anti-zionists win and Israel becomes yet another failed post-colonial state but doesn't have actual ethnic cleansing besides largely voluntary "jewish flight", "the zionists were right" could easily become the unthinkable opinion even as events validate some of their concerns.
For an unrelated example, take the following question. Which of the following exist as "real" distinct and inborn traits and which are just social phenomenon: transgender, non-binary, demisexual, otherkin, plurality? (And of the ones that exist, are the "real" cases currently outnumbered by the social ones?) It can be very frustrating to watch someone act like the answer is obvious based on an overton window popularized in their community a handful of years ago when I saw how the sausage got made.
It's not about giving credit, it's about understanding and engaging with what people actually believe.
If they believe in the "one non-Jewish state where Jews will not be persecuted" thing, they are incorrigibly naive and not worth engaging with. If, as is more likely, they realize their desired policies will lead to expulsion or killing of the Israeli Jews and they use the impossible position as a way of avoiding responsibility for advocating that, then they don't believe what they say.
Take Thomas Jefferson's reasons for calling for slaves to emancipated but also deported:
I believe the past few years have demonstrated he was more than half right. The whites may have (mostly) dropped their prejudices, but blacks have retained the recollections of the injuries and there indeed have been "new provocations". Certainly the convulsions have not ended, though extermination seems at least far away.
I believe the past few years have demonstrated he was more than half right.
Yes, I remembered that passage because it seemed prophetic. But of course both denying citizenship based on race and his later discussion of the black-white intelligence gap are now outside the mainstream overton window, something to be cited as proof of generic racism and justification for tearing down statues but not actually engaged with. Including by those who simultaneously find it obvious that Israel can't give palestinians citizenship. The point is that resorting to the "obvious" lets incongruous views pass by completely unexamined. The intent of anti-zionists in comparing Israel to other ethno-nationalist projects is that Israel should be opposed, but other outcomes of taking that idea seriously would include becoming more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism in general or thinking more rigorously about what you think separates Israel from the others. It's not that those views can't be reconciled, it's that people should have to at least realize they're doing so. And perhaps become more understanding of the views that they currently view as cartoon villainy, whether those views are "racism" or the people who think there is a moral mandate for Israel to give up on being a jewish state and give citizenship to the palestinians in the hope that this will result in living together in peace.
It was funny citing TJ as if he was wrong. I would think both the whites and blacks would’ve been better off with a clean divorce (with blacks provided sufficient supplies etc to survive for a number of years until they could be fully established).
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Notes -
The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).
The zionists are right. I don’t see any solution to this that doesn’t eventually look like a Zionism transposed to some other location. The historic record here is pretty clear — a stateless Jewish minority is going to be the target of either states looking for a scapegoat or angry mobs taking matters into their own hands. In most Muslim countries, non Muslims are second class citizens at best. So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere. If that’s the case, you need to create a continuous land area in which Jews are given complete control. And you’re now displacing whoever lives there now. It ends up looking almost exactly like Israel except now we’re building in South America or Montana or Wales or something. There aren’t really good answers.
I feel like it is important to point out that however valid this argument may be, making it forever forecloses your ability to criticise Trump, the alt-right and white nationalists. Once you cross this line you lose the ethical and moral ground which allows you to say that white nationalism/ethnonationalism is bad at all. There simply aren't any real arguments for why the Jews need to be protected and get their own ethnostate that don't also apply to white or yellow people beyond blatant ethnic supremacy (that would sound something like "The Jews get to have their own nation because they're God's chosen people and above all others").
And while this is the motte and hence nobody cares that a pseudonymous Zensunni wanderer can't exactly condemn Trump anymore, these concerns become much bigger in the real world where people make political statements tied to their identity. All these public arguments, discussions and comments about what's happening are going to be remembered, and the left is famous for digging into people's past comments in order to discredit them in arguments so this isn't exactly a purely academic concern.
That's not true. E.g. whites are much more numerous. It's not realistic to imagine that whites in the USA could suffer the same fate as Jews in Germany - there's too many of them.
White people are vanishingly small as a percentage of the total population on Earth, so all you're saying is that we just have to wait a bit longer before they can have their own ethnostate? Would you also support Israel ceasing to be an ethnostate once the jewish diaspora population gets a bit bigger? How you slice the salami matters a lot too - do the Boers get to have their own ethnostate, given that they are a tiny minority on the verge of being wiped out and far smaller in population than the jews? I'm struggling to see the actual principle here - "you only get an ethnostate if you could plausibly be wiped out" is a contradictory and self-defeating argument anyway because it means that the moment you have the ethnostate you're protected and hence no longer deserve it... and if the ethnostate DOESN'T protect you, then there's no point tying it to numbers like that.
I think each people group is well served to have at least one country where they are a majority. Whether or not a country exists for the explicit purpose of giving them a majority is pretty much immaterial. E.g. Egypt is not a country formed for the purpose of giving Arabs a state of their own, but it nonetheless functions perfectly well as an Arab-majority country, such that the establishment of an Arab ethnostate is unnecessary. Whites don't need an ethnostate because we already have the thing that an ethnostate would exist to give us. E.g. when white Zimbabweans were a persecuted minority, they had somewhere to flee to that opened the doors for them.
And yes, this does mean I would like the Boers to have their own land - ideally they would have beaten the British and the Orange Free State would have survived. Alas.
Heterosexual white men are not protected from affirmative action (discrimination) in most of the West, so what is that elusive 'the thing that an ethnostate would give exist to give us'?
I mean if you want to form a "heterosexual white male" ethno/gender/sexualstate, go right ahead. But personally I'd like to have women in my country.
That is not what I am suggesting.
This makes me think that one way for Israel to resolve that Hamas conundrum would be to offer Palestinians female-only visas, scholarships and massive cash bonuses to study and work in Israel and elsewhere. Something like what the Americans tried in Afghanistan but actually effective.
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I think the poorly defined and murky phrase "people group" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. This position makes you a firm supporter of Kurdish nationalism and Catalan separatism, but it unfortunately doesn't actually do anything to give you the solid ground you need to actually condemn white nationalists. What exactly is it that makes Jews a "people group" worthy of their own apartheid regime and ethnostate? I don't think you've defined that clearly enough to avoid also endorsing white nationalism, and you have also opened yourself up to a bunch of really dumb borderline questions like whether the Scots-Irish population in the USA deserves their own homeland.
My rule is any group of people that constitutes a majority in a defined geographical area of a city or larger should be able to form their own state if they want to. The lines that separate us are arbitrary and malleable, if people choose to care about being Hispanic or Saxon or Catalan or Appalachians then so be it.
I'm not particularly invested in condemning white nationalism. I don't support it on an object level, but I don't see it as being somehow illegitimate for a country to decide its own immigration policy or whatever.
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Jews get to have an ethnostate because they’ve been genocided several times. I don’t think that’s identical to other arguments. I’m not worried about other states wanting to have an ethnostate if they want one.
White people have also been genocided several times through history as well (European history is surprisingly brutal). They're still around, but if that's an argument against them getting an ethnostate then it also applies to the jews.
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Honestly when you saw the riots in Paris and the marches and London maybe it isn’t unreasonable to keep France for the French or England for the English.
Personally I thought the Rotherham case was a far greater argument for keeping England for the English. I'm not even going to feign a lack of disgust at people who think protests in favour of Hamas are where the line was crossed as opposed to Rotherham (though to clarify I'm not accusing you of this right now).
Agreed. Rotherham is disgusting. Basically “sure we let them rape white girls because we don’t want to be called racist”
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There is no actual reason to suppose that if every Israeli Jew were granted the right to live in the US or Australia or the Netherlands or someplace, they would be vulnerable to scapegoating or pogroms. Sure, in Saudi they would, but granting Jews the right of return to Australia would not actually make them vulnerable to discrimination- they just wouldn't have their own country.
Australia is an immigration friendly place, but even so 7 million people all at once would be stretching the friendship a bit.
Edit: Also, we did just have a big crowd in Sydney chanting "gas the jews". Such people are an extreme fringe, but can anyone guarantee they will remain a fringe?
That was just an example, you know. No doubt a 1-state solution where the Palestinians are full citizens, backstopped by the CANZUK nations pledging to accept any Israeli Jewish immigrant who applies, would not result in a Jewish genocide(although it might well result in far fewer Jews in a generation as some of the conditions leading to a high Israeli-Jewish birthrate are probably unique to Israel).
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Interestingly, Arab Christians do, despite evidence of discrimination. Arab Muslims do not.
Probably a lesson in there somewhere.
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Yes, but anti-zionists get no credit for obvious impossibilities. "Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel with right of return and the Israeli Jews don't end up in a very bad place in a very short time" is such an impossibility.
It's not about giving credit, it's about understanding and engaging with what people actually believe. Saying they want to ethnically cleanse the jews just gets denial because it's not true, arguing that a one-state solution would inevitably result in ethnic cleansing might result in an actual conversation.
Furthermore unthinkingly dismissing "obvious impossibilities" is lazy thinking that tends to just make people slaves to their local overton window. There are plenty of people to whom it is obvious that historical opponents of racial integration were just racist villains with no motive besides hate, while simultaneously dismissing palestinian citizenship as an impossibility and never even considering that those historical figures might have had their own well-thought-out reasons. Take Thomas Jefferson's reasons for calling for slaves to emancipated but also deported:
The point isn't that the situation with the palestinians is necessarily the same as those historical analogues. It is that actually considering the matter leads to understanding and perspective based on something better than what your social environment considers "obvious". If the anti-zionists win and Israel becomes yet another failed post-colonial state but doesn't have actual ethnic cleansing besides largely voluntary "jewish flight", "the zionists were right" could easily become the unthinkable opinion even as events validate some of their concerns.
For an unrelated example, take the following question. Which of the following exist as "real" distinct and inborn traits and which are just social phenomenon: transgender, non-binary, demisexual, otherkin, plurality? (And of the ones that exist, are the "real" cases currently outnumbered by the social ones?) It can be very frustrating to watch someone act like the answer is obvious based on an overton window popularized in their community a handful of years ago when I saw how the sausage got made.
If they believe in the "one non-Jewish state where Jews will not be persecuted" thing, they are incorrigibly naive and not worth engaging with. If, as is more likely, they realize their desired policies will lead to expulsion or killing of the Israeli Jews and they use the impossible position as a way of avoiding responsibility for advocating that, then they don't believe what they say.
I believe the past few years have demonstrated he was more than half right. The whites may have (mostly) dropped their prejudices, but blacks have retained the recollections of the injuries and there indeed have been "new provocations". Certainly the convulsions have not ended, though extermination seems at least far away.
Yes, I remembered that passage because it seemed prophetic. But of course both denying citizenship based on race and his later discussion of the black-white intelligence gap are now outside the mainstream overton window, something to be cited as proof of generic racism and justification for tearing down statues but not actually engaged with. Including by those who simultaneously find it obvious that Israel can't give palestinians citizenship. The point is that resorting to the "obvious" lets incongruous views pass by completely unexamined. The intent of anti-zionists in comparing Israel to other ethno-nationalist projects is that Israel should be opposed, but other outcomes of taking that idea seriously would include becoming more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism in general or thinking more rigorously about what you think separates Israel from the others. It's not that those views can't be reconciled, it's that people should have to at least realize they're doing so. And perhaps become more understanding of the views that they currently view as cartoon villainy, whether those views are "racism" or the people who think there is a moral mandate for Israel to give up on being a jewish state and give citizenship to the palestinians in the hope that this will result in living together in peace.
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It was funny citing TJ as if he was wrong. I would think both the whites and blacks would’ve been better off with a clean divorce (with blacks provided sufficient supplies etc to survive for a number of years until they could be fully established).
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