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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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The issue that many commenters face when looking at the Israel/Palestine war is they see what looks like a conflict occurring in 2024 between a first world country and a third world country. That is not what is happening. What they are seeing is a stone-age tribe with nuclear weapons fighting another stone-age tribe without nuclear weapons. The only reason the first tribe hasn't used their nuclear weapons is because there is sufficient international pressure that the stone-age barbarians realize they have to at least pretend to act like a first world nation.

This is a problem. Because a stone-age conflict cannot be solved by a modern "everyone let's just sit down and talk about it" post-World War Two UN-led kumbaya session. The Israelis want a chunk of land that roughly corresponds to Israel. The Palestinians want a chunk of land that roughly corresponds to Israel. This is an intractable difference. It cannot be solved by "well in Area A the Israelis will have control, and in Area B there will be joint control, and in Area C the Palestinians will have control" because neither side wants the other to have any area of control. They want their land, and the other tribe of stone-age barbarians can fuck right off. This exact conflict has played out in the same way time and time again. One group of tribals hits the other group of tribals in the head. The tribals that are a lot closer to modern westerners are much better at organized violence, and so they beat the shit out of the other group of tribals, but are stopped from actually winning the war at the last minute by a bunch of modern humans who are horrified at the idea of stone age barbarism. How uncivilized. How savage. Tsk tsk. Can't have that. No no. Stop that. So instead of actually winning the goddamn war in the way that stone-age barbarians usually win wars (insert Conan quote here), both tribes retire to their homes and gear up for the next try.

Until the Israelis are driven into the sea, or the Palestinians are driven into the desert, this conflict will continue. Frankly, as soon as the Powers That Be are sufficiently distracted by a big enough crisis elsewhere in the world (Russia finally trips over its own dick and gets into a shooting war with NATO, China invades Taiwan, India and Pakistan finally decide they've had enough of the other existing) the Israelis are probably going to drive the Gazans into the Sinai and let the Egyptians deal with that headache. The Egyptians, being another group of stone-age tribal barbarians, will deal with an invading migrating group of stone-age barbarians the same way that stone-age barbarians always deal with migrating groups of other stone-age barbarians. They'll kill the men, integrate the women, and raise the children as their own. The West Bank tribe, seeing what happened to the Gaza tribe, will either decide to go balls to the wall and get massacred and driven into Jordan, or quietly surrender and accept their inevitable destruction. My money is on the former. Israel, as they try to look like a nice modern civilized first-world country instead of a stone-age tribe, will say "sorry" for a few years, maybe pay reparations in a few decades, and that will be that. The other powers in the region will shake their fists and say "curse those fucking jews!" while quietly thanking Allah that they no longer have to pay lip service to Arab Solidarity. Israeli-Arab relations will be set back by about twenty years or so, but eventually everyone will agree that while it's a shame that things happened the way they did there's no point in holding onto old grudges so they might as well normalize relations and start trading again. After all those (Allah-cursed infidel) jews make some really nice toys so might as well buy them.