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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26076 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Israel has been in a stalemate situation with Palestine for a long time. One has to wonder why Israel has not been able to impose their will on Palestine even though they are the superior State and they have the backing of the global hegemon. However, maybe this stalemate is a feature of the incentives. Imagine you are a US congress critter and there are companies in your state that are supplying weapons to Israel as part of the US->Israel defence aid. If the Palestinian question was resolved then a bunch of people in your district may no longer be employed making weapons. Is this is a possibility? Are congress critters actually intelligent or machiavellian enough to carry out this policy. People assume the current situation is a result of 'commies' in the state department but maybe its because of 'capitalists' in the state department.

Israel hasn't been able to impose its will because the conflict is ultimately a fight over PR. Western democracies "hold themselves to a higher standard" (or "hamstring themselves", depending on your POV) by refusing to do population transfers that autocracies do routinely. Pakistan recently announced it was deporting 2 million Afghans and nobody cared. Azerbaijan just ethnically cleansed Nagorno Karabakh and there was barely a peep. But if Israel threatens to do something similar to the West Bank, the entire world freaks out. Palestinians have long recognized this double-standard and have maximally abused it by being very plugged-in to places like the NYT and other outlets.

Not that Jews as a whole are entirely blameless in this regard, as many of the Diaspora have been key players in the social justice crusades. The double game that organizations like the ADL play is mind-boggling.

One has to wonder why Israel has not been able to impose their will on Palestine even though they are the superior State and they have the backing of the global hegemon.

Because if they Final Solution the Palestinians, that would be sort of awkward, given their own history.

If the Palestinian question was resolved then a bunch of people in your district may no longer be employed making weapons.

I highly doubt that, they'd find some new reason to send military aid to Israel. It's not like they need the aid they receive, Israel is a wealthy nuclear power and is more than capable of producing their own munitions.

See graph, observe the odd one out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid#By_country

One has to wonder why Israel has not been able to impose their will on Palestine even though they are the superior State and they have the backing of the global hegemon.

Killing a person is cheap, subduing or reeducating them is expensive. China from the reports got its way in Xinjiang, but damn this operation was expensive. Just killing the Uyghurs would have been way cheaper.

Killing people en masses has got much more expensive these days, if you account for second-order costs. In the good old days, countries disposing of even millions of members of certain ethnic groups wasn't a big deal to their neighbors, whereas now, in the era where everyone is obsessed with human rights, that's a swift route to sanctions and even potentially military intervention.

If Mao had killed all the Uighurs, it would have been a shrug. He certainly killed enough of his own supporters. If Xi did it, China would be a global pariah.

The fact that it isn't is a clear sign that despite people conflating cultural indoctrination and the "kill all of them" concepts with "genocide", they still recognize a difference in severity between both of them if they consider both sins.

There's a particular mistake made by a certain sort of person wherein they conflate a lack of inclination with the lack of abilty and i feel like that's the fundemental mistake that you're making here.

The theme is: the hegemon failing to impose its will in particular direction

Could the lack of inclination possibly be covering for a lack of competence?

Possibly, but the shear one-sidedness of the IDF's response post October 7th would seem to indicate otherwise.

impose their will in what way? they can't just kill or expel millions of people. even the hardcore zionist bloc would be hard pressed to justify such a thing, it would instantly destroy their relationship with america.

the reason hamas launched this attack is because they were losing - israel was able to 'mow the grass' in gaza every few years, entrench its settlements in the west bank, and normalize relations with their arab neighbors. the status quo pre october 7 was totally fine for the israelis.

The Palestinians also have the backing of the global hegemon, though they are backed by a different faction within it.

This is a bizarre situation and it is the reason why we hear about this war constantly from the press- in stark contrast to for instance Yemen or Azerbaijan.

Ultimately both sides are at the mercy of the US navy, and they behave accordingly.

No faction in America has complete control of anything, least of all the government.

The pro Palestinian side however, has far more than you give them credit for- they have major pull in education, media, and NGO spaces.

The pro-Palestinian faction, or rather the faction with some ethnic and/or religious loyalties to Palestinians, represents many key US allies in critical regions of the world for great power rivalry (eg in the Middle East and South East Asia).

Malaysia, for example, is one of the most pro-Palestinian countries in the world and isn’t even close to the Levant. You’d be surprised at how zealous they are in support of Palestine, how glued they are to the TV about how many Gazans are killed, how much they desperately LARP as Arabs and aspire to be great Muslims. And Malaysia is a key ally with a large Chinese minority and extensive Chinese political and economic influence. Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. Pakistan is a key player in China’s new silk road stuff.

So for wider geopolitical reasons giving full license to Israel to do what they want with the Palestinians - even if the Gulf Arabs and Egyptians are fine with it - isn’t in the US’ interests.

Israel might be militarized, but it's also a democracy. Israel can't carry out an ethnic cleansing policy because no one will take the palestinians and it can't carry out a genocide openly because there's sufficient internal opposition, plus they're not well suited for autarchy due to size and location.

Now at the same time they also can't make the kind of concessions that would enable palestinian leaders to keep their people largely under control because the government which did that wouldn't get reelected. Of course this latter one is a moot point because palestinian leaders seem to invariably be either evil or incompetent.

'Democracies' can carry out a variety of policies that go directly against the voting public if they properly dance to the tune of mass media. To put it another way, whilst the election cycle is fast, the news cycle is even faster.

To that end, for any big project like ethnic cleansing of millions of people, you need very low time preference on a group level. A strong belief in something concrete and anti-fragile like a population group is very conducive to finishing big projects whilst riding the lows and highs of mass media and the election cycle.

One has to wonder why Israel has not been able to impose their will on Palestine even though they are the superior State and they have the backing of the global hegemon.

Because they wouldn't have the backing of the global hegemon in genociding the Palestinians, and the Palestinians are too stubborn and hostile to be controlled any other way.

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