I wish I had your confidence about the failure of these protests, inane and immoral though they may be.
The first challenge is that so many young people today (and many who are not so young) fundamentally see Israel as colonial implant in the middle east. They have been sold this line for so long is has become the perceived (un)wisdom.
The second challenge is that I don't see the far left in America or for that matter Australia correcting their underlying ignorance and/or wilful blindness to the sheer awfulness of Hamas, Iran and Syria to their own people, which far exceeds anything that Israel is doing. The same applies to the refusal of the left or even most Moslem states to recognise what is truly a genocide against the Uighur in Xinjiang.
My conclusion is that ultimately this is about anti-semitism, based on the exceptionalism they impute to Israel.
The proof of this - unfortunately - will come when there is no change in the protests even when Netanyahu is justifiably defenestrated, and a more reasonable government without Ben-Givir and Smotrich is formed. This will happen even if this new government actually tries to negotiate a two state deal, as I believe it should.
"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" is still relevant here. I agree that a good slice of the undercurrent is antisemitism, but, paradoxically, another slice is just seeing Israel as a Western country. They're "one of us", and thus not subject to the blanket multiculturalism pass that allows Islamic countries to be misogynistic and occasionally barbaric without being censured for it.
The other point I would make that identifying anti-semitism as part of Israel's challenge of maintaining global legitimacy, let alone sympathy, and therefore dismissing the issue, is not a solution.
Yes it isn't fair, and in fact it is downright evil, but that just makes it more urgent that Israel finds a deal with its neighbours that gets it out of the morass of an occupation that is now nearly 60 years old, and other than for a messianic maniac fringe was surely never part of Israel's 1948 or 1967 strategy.
Neither of the actual parties to the conflict want a two-state "solution." It is only a solution to outsiders who are dismayed by the conflict and want it to end so they don't have to think about it anymore. The Israelis don't want a terrorist entity on their borders, and the Palestinians will be satisfied with nothing except the removal of the Jews from the entire area. Until this changes (or until the weaker party is defeated), the war will go on.
There are factions on both sides who want a two state solution, because it's the only realistic path to peace. Unfortunately those factions are out of power on both sides.
The two-state solution is not a path to peace, rather a possible result of peace. With peace, much is possible. Without peace, nothing is possible. At this point, Palestinians would rather have war, so the question of a two-state solution is irrelevant until they change their minds, or are decisively defeated.
Douglas Martin. Since the end of the second intifada(2005), it appears the most likely result of peace is further expansion of the settlements and dispossession of Palestinians, not advancement toward a two state solution. Per Haaretz reports, Netanyahu supported Hamas in Gaza so that he would have no one to negotiate with and so that promotion of working toward a two-state solution could be ignored as impossible. Opinion polls swing back and forth but in March 2024, over 60% of Gazans polled broadly in favor of a two-state solution. A genuine, good faith, effort by an Israeli government to create an independent state for Palestinians conditioned on it bringing a enduring peace has not been tried since the assassination of Rabin in 1995.
It seems that you imagine that the Israelis can rustle up peace out of thin air. Do you feel that the Palestinians might have something to do with this? Or are they absolved of any responsibility? Because they're pathetic, or brown, or indigenous, or something? Do you think it's fine to torture and murder people over some kind of property dispute?
Netanyahu has been where he is for all these years, because Arafat put him there by means of the Second Intifada. Arafat's treachery, and the hundreds of dead he caused by barbaric means, destroyed the Israeli peace party and made Netanyahu's accession - and his indulgence of the settlers - inevitable. That is what made the two-state plan impossible and irrelevant. It, like the wall, and Gaza, are simply consequences of Palestinian misbehavior. As this latest atrocity shows, the Israelis couldn't make peace with those people if they tried.
Every morning 9.5 million Israeli citizens -- 7 million Jewish, 2 million Palestinian, 1/2 million other -- get up and get along. That peace wasn't rustled up. It's the product of being consistently civil, sporadically friendly, doggedly engaged. Both sides are smart enough to have noticed that when you're nice to someone, almost always they're nice back. If you believe it is impossible to get along with someone, you absolve yourself from the effort of trying. But Palestinian, Jew or Other, we have to be smart enough to see we really have no choice, win or lose, but to try to preserve the peace we have and create more for our children and grandchildren. Israelis know how to do it; they're doing it.
I think Olmert made a genuine attempt as recently as 2008. Abbas refused to engage. How genuine was the Olmert Plan? It even included Israel building a tunnel at its own expense linking Gaza with Ramallah!
Isn't the biggest obstacle to any kind of compromise peace the fact that the Palestinian nation itself was born in violent struggle against Zionism?
In 1920 anti-Jewish riots broke out in Jerusalem in which the rioters cried out "Faisal is our King" (referring to a Hashemite monarch based in Damascus), demonstrating that Palestinian Arabs had been violently resisting Zionism before they had even begun to self-identify as Palestinians.
And the main thing that differentiates Palestinians from other Levantine Arabs was the Nakba of 1948, with the dream of undoing that trauma by destroying Israel (and symbolized for example by the key representing homes seized by the Zionists) being the very essence of Palestinian identity.
Denazifying Germany was possible because Germany had already been a united nation-state for 62 years before the Nazis took over, while the notion of a "German nation" had existed since the 16th century (eg "Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation"). A Germany after Nazism was conceivable because a Germany before Nazism had existed.
By contrast it is impossible for the Palestinians to make peace with Israel as long as they identify as Palestinians: the conflict could end only with a total Palestinian victory (the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Levant) or a total Israeli victory, which would mean either the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from historic Palestine (as Meir Kahane advocated), or that the Palestinians be beaten down to the extent that they cease to identify as Palestinians (ie that Israel roughly does to the Palestinians what Russia wants to do to the Ukrainians).
The first Intifada was before that (ok, I was wrong in the date of the acceptance of the 2-state solution; it was 1988 and not 1987). If anything, the acceptance of the 2SS was a result of First Intifada
About the 2nd, has nothing to do with the 2SS vs. 1SS, but about the details of the delimitation of the 2 states (and, as direct cause, Ariel Sharon entering in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, who is in the territory claimed by the Palestinian Authority); and the PLO-inspired (I am talking about PLO, not about Hamas) actions during the 2nd Intifada were in the occupied territories, not in Israel.
Why the Intifada prompted the acceptance of the 2.state solution: because changed the center of gravity of the Palestinian struggle from the diapora refugees, wanting to "return", to the Palestinians in the territories, who have the occupation as the main problem (and also was an example of a change who started in the 80s: the repletion of "People's War" - guerrilla war - by "People's Power - mass insurrection - by main form of struggle)
Ancient history, invalidated by events and today wholly irrelevant. Arafat was, first, lying, and now dead. The currently alive Palestinian so-called leadership and the overwhelming majority of Palestinians themselves are all in on the River to the Sea thing which envisions something other than any number of states with Jews in it. Meanwhile, the Second Intifada destroyed the Israeli peace party, so, today, in 2024, the war continues, there will be no negotiated peace. Consequences. Palestinians could end the war at any time, but they don’t yet want to. At the moment, they love it more than they love their own children. Surrender is the only door out of their dilemma, and if they won’t walk through it themselves, they will have to be kicked through it, for the sake of world peace.
The problem with this argument is that the protesters keep being more right than wrong. I've been arguing with a pro-Palestinian friend since October 8th about how bad Hamas is, how Israel has a right to defend itself, etc. And yet everything he predicted about IDF overreach and murder of civilians, aid workers, etc. has come to pass and been backed up repeatedly. I roughly agree with Noah that his position is wrong and leads to a set of dead-end goals, but it'd be nice if the Israeli government could just make the smallest effort to stop digging the hole deeper.
I agree with this. I think some folks in the 1990s thought that the two-state peace process was some kind of sop to Palestine, when in practice the smarter folks in power realized that solving the Palestinian occupation was critical to the national security of Israel. Unfortunately the Israeli right was unable to think long-term about this and now all of the damage is coming to pass, exactly as could have been predicted. I'm very pessimistic about the long-term prospects for Israel.
You don't have to even address the moral complexities of the issue to see that it's going to weaken any long-term military alliance Israel might have built with its neighbors.
The real issue here is the six-month near total Israeli blockade of food, medicine, and potable water to 2.3 million civilians, half of them children. Young children are now literally starving to death in Gaza. An Israeli policy of using famine as a weapon of war may or may not be genocide at present. But if not corrected it soon will be.
There is no "near total blockade". Tens of thousands of truckloads have been let into Gaza in the last 6 months. Israel provides plenty of water to Gaza. All this while the Gaza authorities are holding over 100 Israelis hostage.
UNICEF says that hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza are malnourished and dozens are dying of it every week. I find them more credible than you. What is the source for your claim that Gaza is getting enough food?
Over the past four weeks, an average of about 140 trucks carrying food and other aid have arrived in Gaza each day, according to a database maintained by UNRWA, the U.N. agency that supports Palestinians. But the World Food Program estimates that 300 trucks of food are needed daily to begin to meet people’s basic food needs.
As of Tuesday, about 1,200 trucks were waiting at El Arish in Egypt, including more than 800 containing food supplies.
Not according to the New York Times. What is the source to your claim that more food is going into Gaza than before the war?
Also the entire population is now dependent on food delivery while before us was 1/3. Are Gazans getting more calories per capita?
From the NYT article referenced
“ Aid headed into northern Gaza has to pass through one of two other Israeli checkpoints. Aid agencies, citing Israeli restrictions, security issues and poor road conditions, have largely stopped deliveries to the north.”
The protests will end when the killing of civilians in Palestine ends. The protestors are there out of a sense of human decency and empathy. You bizarrely label this as "anit-semitism."
It's of course delicious irony to see them spread widely across college campuses after you and Noah claim that they were the rantings of a few extremist lunatics. Gen Z is positively being radicalized by this experience.
I wonder if the anti-Zionism of the UK's Socialist Workers Party is rooted in the fact that one of its pivotal figures was Tony Cliff (née Yigael Gluckstein) who was born to a Zionist family in Mandate Palestine?
In the Mandate era Zionism was much more of a "colonial implant in the Middle East" than it ended up being, when the original Zionist colonists of the New Yishuv were supplemented after World War II, first by Holocaust survivors from Europe, and then by Middle Eastern Jews fleeing the pogroms that broke out across the Middle East in response to the Nakba.
A good deal of attention relating to American public opinion on the Middle East has centered on the protests on college campuses around the country. This is not unexpected. Sympathy for the Palestinians has traditionally been higher among younger than among older Americans, even though across the 2000s and 2010s, young people on average remained more sympathetic toward the Israelis than toward the Palestinians, with not a lot of change over this period.
But the past five years have seen 18- to 29-year-olds’ sympathies shift to the point where they are roughly evenly divided between the two Middle East antagonists. This makes them by far the most pro-Palestinian of any age group. (There has been little significant change in the proportion of the U.S. population who are 18-29 over time.)
Yeah, isn't it strange? I went well over a decade loathing what Israel had been doing ever since Sharon was their PM, and here I am brushing off the crazies who are calling the Israelis genocidal white colonizers (Israel does a lot of bad things, but that isn't a charge that makes any sense at all). It's odd, do say the least.
I do think the Israelis are colonizers, especially the ongoing settlements in the West Bank. But the Zionist project started well over 100 years ago, many Israelis are 3rd generation or more and it would be as wrong to uproot them from their homes in Israel proper as was the Nakba. There needs to be good faith governance working towards coexistence in Gaza and Israel and we have neither!
I haven’t been to a Palestine protest (I don’t support blocking freeways) so I don’t know whether a lot of these accusations Noah talks about these provocateurs are genuine, but I trust he is at least arguing from what he thinks is true. I certainly think there’s a Substack crowd constantly crying wolf about anti-Semitism for sure, most folks who say the protestors are anti-Semitic are full of shit. Most folks I know that say they support Palestine are not saying the ridiculous things people have talked about. I would say I know very few people who support what Israel is doing at this stage of the conflict. A fair amount of folks were happy at the very beginning that Palestine did something to strike back against their oppression, but no one loves Hamas’ tactics, and it would have made a lot more sense for this to have come out of the WB than Gaza. But no one i know believes that Jews are the problem, just the Israeli right wing and its American enablers, and they’ll all hold their nose and vote for Biden bc they know Trump is worse, even if they don’t love him (for the record, I think Biden is perfectly fine, though I wish the Dems would nominate Mark Kelly instead!)
But I am coming around to the idea that there’s a big failure to police the worst extremes of the movement, and that it’s probably worst at colleges bc at that age people are just more zealous and don’t get the world is basically a giant gray area yet. In Seattle there definitely is a shrill and absolutist side of the left that’s a loud, counterproductive minority. And when they block the freeway I’m like dudes you’re hurting your cause. Go to Tel Aviv and protest there!
Sigh, to clarify: what crazy-ass Israeli settlers do is obviously stealing land. It's illegal under international law and we shouldn't tolerate it, but right-wing Israeli governments kind of tacitly allow it because they are right-wing ass clowns.
The point I was making is the accusation leveled against Israel (white-supremacist colonizers) lacks any kind of nuance; I don't think those people are talking about the right-wing settlers, I think they're talking about Israel proper. As you said, if THAT were the problem, the fighting would be in the West Bank, not in Gaza.
Next, I'd point out that while I think you're basically right, you should also be aware that Hamas has been artificially propped up for years by Netanyahu as a tactic for not having to deal with the Palestinians. "Look, they're divided, look, Hamas are psychos, we can't deal with them!" and so they never had to resume talks. Hamas also, over time, had been starting to moderate ever so slightly. What happened on October 7th was, a dangerous wing of Hamas felt like they needed to try to strike Israel, do what they could to derail the normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia, draw attention to their conflict, provoke an over-reaction, and possibly also get Iran involved. They succeeded wildly on almost all of these goals (except derailing the talks; those appear to just be paused and, shockingly, most of the other Arab states around the area are helping Israel, directly or indirectly).
What I asked a moment ago, and would ask anyone again is, are we certain that the crazy left freaking out about this conflict and spouting off ignorant takes isn't just getting this garbage from online sources, and possibly from Russia? Why are they doing this and not freaking out about Ukraine? I think, and have thought, this is all highly suspect.
It's not that weird that other Arab states are helping Israel. The more militant elements of the Palestinian cause are either off-shoots of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas and other jihad groups) or offshoots of the PLO/Fatah/PFLP.
Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia all have had significant conflicts with some or all of these groups. The Islamist groups were responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, the others for a variety of successful and attempted assassinations of Jordanian prime ministers and monarchs over the last 50-60 years.
After Mohamed Morsi was deposed in Egypt following a turbulent presidency, the Muslim Brotherhood was banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. This is one of the big reasons why those countries don't want Palestinian refugees, they feel elements of the Palestinian cause are a direct threat to their governments.
You do know that the Zionists bought and paid for their land? From rich Arab landlords who lived in comfortable places like Beirut and who never saw the peasants who worked to give them their income. Does this make them “colonizers”?
Until there was war and they just forced the rest of them off, right? But yes, I mean the British “bought” most of America from the Natives too, for beads and blankets, but they forced the sale or just took whatever they wanted. Israel is definitely a Jewish colony made up of settlers from around the world. They bought some of it and gained the rest through British partitioning, asset seizure, war, terrorism, assassinations, creating a surveillance state, etc.
Not that the Palestinians are the best at making the case for themselves, they’d do a lot better if they pushed for coexistence, even though they were there before the Jews started returning from their diaspora due to persecution in Europe. But the Israelis are sneaky (the settlements plus all the political assassinations and spying on their allies) and heavy-handed af which keeps them far from any moral high ground. Plus their leaders support Trump (I can forgive genocide, but not this).
The Israelis and Palestinians are both trying to genocide the other. We should not be supporting either side except for towards a lasting peace.
"There was war." This is like saying "mistakes were made." Abstraction. There is a subject and an object here. The subject, in this case, is the Arab League and the for-real fascist Palestinian leaders, who initiated this war. This war continues to this very day, as do the necessities of war that are the opposite of law and justice.
The cold logic of the situation is this: regardless of anybody's idea of rights and wrongs, the war has now become a danger to world peace, and needs to be ended, on any terms. This is impossible so long as the Palestinians hang on to the idea that they have a right and a religious duty to massacre and expel the Israelis so they won't have to live on equal terms with infidels. But the Palestinians still passionately love this idea and they won't quit by themselves. So for the war to end, they have to be made to quit, by threat or actuality of overwhelming force. This is cruel, but not as cruel as endless war over the generations.
The faster and more forcefully this happens, the less Palestinian suffering, and the more Palestinian survivors there will be. And their grandchildren will be able to actually live in the land of Palestine, between the river and the sea, at peace with their Jewish neighbors. There is no other pathway to this. The outpouring of world support has the consequence of delaying this process and ensuring endless war and endless suffering for the people they claim to support. It is not the moral high ground, it is cruelty and self-indulgence. So spare me the words.
WaPo and NYT--which I read daily--have noted that the protests have been almost entirely non-violent, so you might want to delete that particular adjective. Repeat: these are almost entirely peaceful protesters.
Just like with the Vietnam War protesters, the Black Lives Matter protesters, the Anti-Globalism protesters, this current batch of anti-Genocide in Gaza protesters are also a mixed bag of good, bad, and everything in-between; brought together to protest what they see as state-sanctioned injustice.
Some of these Columbia protesters are clearly antisemitic; while many are actually Jews who are disgusted with the brutality of the Netanyahu regime's intentional starvation of over a million children. But none of those college kids should be labelled antisemitic or crazy simply for criticizing Israeli government policy.
Parsing the definitional degree of the protesters’ antisemitism is beside the point. The problem is that they are out of line in their behavior, which goes well beyond protected speech and more importantly that there is a double standard about enforcing this. Jewish students deserve fair treatment from these feckless college administrators who have detailed codes of conduct that they are unwilling to enforce. These kids are purportedly adults but seem unaware of their obligations of citizenship. Being suspended or expelled from school might lead to a useful train of thought for them.
But seriously, there is such a thing as 'hate speech', as well as verbal threats of violence. But since this thread is about what or what does not constitute Antisemitism by college kids currently protesting Israel's maybe-maybe-not-quite-yet genocide in Gaza, let's investigate semantics: "From the River to the Sea", for example, has radically diverse meanings depending on who's saying it. To Ben-Gvir Smotrich, and other ultra-right member's of Bibi's cabinet, in Hebrew it's an ethno-nationalist call for a Jews-only Greater Israel from the Jordan River to the Med. To a Hamas supporter it's the opposite. Most of the kids protesting on campus probably have no clue of that slogan's deeper meanings, and just like it because it rhymes nicely.
Yes. Noah writes well; but I don't agree with his premise on this one., that students protesting for a 2-State solution are antisemitic or leftist dead-enders.
Agreed. And that’s what makes all the more repellent. All these well-meaning intelligent people keeping company with some of the worst people on the planet, and importing a foreign conflict to our shores. But I don’t think they’re protesting for a two-state solution. It may make you feel better to think they are, but this is quite a novel interpretation of “from the river to the sea”
In Hebrew, among the Haredi wingnuts, that is the connotation. What? You didn't think Judaism has its' own share of wingnuts?
Actually, I studied with Zalman Schacter, who was born and raised strict Orthodox, but was essentially ejected from their ranks. He's considered one of the most influential Rabbis of the entire Jewish Reformed movement, here in the US. Amazing man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalman_Schachter-Shalomi
The US does do stand-off attacks, for example, when laying siege to Raqqa during the Isis War. Israel gets in trouble doing the same because Egypt has refused to admit ordinary people who want to escape Gaza. So they’re just there when Israel attacks. When Us did it, the civilians were able to take refuge in other parts of Syria. But Egypt is like, “eat lead” to the Palestinians. Of course, Egypt has its reasons. It doesn’t want refugees; gazans are inbred; it doesn’t want to help Israel cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. But like, no, the US has done and would do the same thing as Israel is doing now.
If Hamas had shown up in say, New Jersey, and went on the same murder, rape, kidnapping rampage that they did in southern Israel, I am confident the US would have reacted similarly to how we reacted to 9-11. Pretty sure there are a lot more deceased civilians due to the US reaction than in Gaza.
This entire anti "colonialism" and "settlers" movement is insane. Every freaking piece of dirt on this planet has been colonized and settled over and over again. The present movement seems only concerned with European colonialism. They apparently want geopolitical boundaries to revert to a map from 1490. And all places must be populated strictly based on race. At least, I think that's what they want. But more likely is that they have no idea what they want.
Yes, I always thought it was insane for woke people to insist that western countries must be beacons of multiculturalism, but also that countries in the global south must be ethnostates drawn along historic tribal boundaries, since there is obviously no way Africans etc could ever handle racial diversity.
Yes. They are hypocrites. They should either relocate to a white place in Europe (by paddleboat, so as to not release any carbon), or kill themselves (in a climate friendly way). Maybe the vexing problem is how they can be cremated or otherwise decompose without releasing carbon?
The good news is tat most of them won't reproduce, and few few who do will "trans-sterilize" their kids so at least no more generations after that.
Hypocrisy is hardly the worst crime. Perhaps, though, if such hypocrisy were pointed out to such people it might encourage a rethink?
(Eg they're likely to respond to such an accusation with something like "it's not my fault, my ancestors moved here before I was born"; which could be an opportunity to humbly suggest extending the same charity to Israeli Jews, and more generally to refrain from demonising people for immutable characteristics.
Palestine was an especially conquered and re-conquered place, throughout history. It's insane to me that "indigineity" is a concept applied to this land in the 1940s.
When people are forced to live in ghettoes and are treated like garbage by the powers that control them, they can get pretty upset. Most of the Occupied Territories have been under direct or indirect Israeli military rule since 1967, which has intentionally kept them weak and poor. The closest the US has come to anything like what Hamas did last Fall have been inner-city ghetto riots, like Watts.
But unlike the US, where you can either leave the ghetto or rez; or stay and do something entrepreneurial, Gazans are kept locked down pretty tight by Israel. If you'd been confined to a ghetto because of your race or religion for 56 years, you'd probably get a bit testy too, eh?
You have the causality entirely backwards. In fact, Israel's disengagement from Gaza was a critical test for your theory. After failed attempts at a negotiated peace, it was thought Israel should just try to unilaterally end the occupation on the theory that it's the occupation that fuels Palestinian rage making it impossible to reach a negotiated settlement. So Israel ended all the things that were claimed to fuel Palestinian rage. Settlements, roadblocks, administrative detentions, military control. Yet, what happened was the following chain of events: Hamas took power and turned Gaza into a launchpad for attacks on Israel, Israel, Egypt, and the rest of the world retaliated by imposing a blockade, Israel was falsely accused of turning Gaza into a concentration camp, Hamas continued its attacks on Israel and continues to build up it's military arm, yer every military response Israel staged was decried as overly brutal. Now here we are. It is quite clear your theory has failed a critical test. All indications are that if Israel were to try the same in the West Bank, things would in literal rivers of blood. The fundamental problem is Palestinians aren't willing to give up their dream of annihilating Israel. As long as that is the case, unilaterally ending the occupation should never again even be considered by anyone with a shred of humanity.
This all reads as very correct to me, especially the parts about how so many of their protests seem so utterly pointless. Where I live, early on, some of the Free Palestine-rs took over a freaking art museum because the restaurant inside it did a thing (or did not do a thing? Can't remember) that somehow offended some supporters of the Palestinian cause. This was like RIGHT after 10/7.
Which is how we ended up with people just going to the freaking museum and being confused why these insane people were screaming at them.
I'm sure that message really got through to the Bibi regime, though, definitely.
Of course, the 1970s also remembered as the period of Nixon and “Silent Majority” backlash against those movements that bled out their mass ideal by that point.
The dates don’t perfectly align with the decades (because reality doesn’t confirm to just round years), but I think that thesis seems right… it’s just that that period also did lead to a backlash against the Democratic Great Society and the Civil Rights Acts.
Just because these extreme movements are on their last legs doesn’t mean they don’t burn the house down on their way out.
It's disgusting that this faction of the left is using the legitimate suffering of Palestinians to sow chaos here at home. They're not interested in helping, they just want to watch everything burn in exchange for an infinitesimally small chance that they'll be able to reshape society. They're willing to let tens of millions of Americans suffer under another Republican led administration from the safety of their privileged positions
"tens of millions of Americans suffer under another Republican led administration"
Huh? I'm in my 60s. I've lived through several different Republican and Democrat led administrations. Have yet to live through one where tens of millions of Americans suffered under any of them. For the most part, life is identical under both.
I think it’s fair to say that electoral consequences can be personal. Pretty clearly someone with an unwanted pregnancy in texas now versus 6 years ago has a pretty drastically different life.
Pretty unfair to assume that a lack of electoral consequences for you or for me means that there is not major consequences for other Americans.
Has nothing to do with the which presidential administration and everything to do with state law. If full term abortion is important to you, move to a different state. I would never live in Utah or Alabama (having nothing to do with abortion). Democrats controlled all three branches of government when Roe overturned. Did they immediately pass some federal law? No. And not because would get stuck down by courts. But because they would lose it as an election issue.
Trump or Biden (both terrible choices imo) will not make a difference in state abortion laws.
I do not follow your logic. If abortion was (for a long time) a federally decided matter and it suddenly becomes a state matter (because of federal appointments) that does not suddenly make federal elections inconsequential.
Your claim was that presidential elections don't cause distinct difference in quality of life. If Hilary had been elected instead of Trump, Roe v Wade in all likelihood would be the law the land still, and for a lot of Americans that is a distinct shift shift in the options legally allowed to them for a major life decision. Hell, having to move, like you argued, is a major quality of life change.
Once again, I understand that your life or my life has been no different under different administrations, but that isn't true for a lot of people.
The Scotus of the 1970s passed Roe v Wade. The Scotus of 2021 reversed it. At one point in our country's history, the SCOTUS declare that black people were 3/5 of a person. At some point later in time, they said race segregated schools were just fine if "separate but equal". At some point in time (even later) the SCOTUS held that it was permissible to involuntarily sterilize certain people ("three generations of idiots is enough"). The SCOTUS is well known to make terrible decisions, and later reverse them (or Congress reverses them, which is how it should be). Roe was one of them IF you think the SCOTUS should follow the actual constitution (which says nothing about abortion. nothing), as opposed to politics. States have had their own abortion laws all along.
Unreasonable abortion restrictions are a way for republicans to lose elections. But passing reasonable abortion laws (and moving on already) is a loser for democrats, since then they could not rally behind abortion.
Pick the state you want to live in based on your own criteria. I live in Wyoming (after 50+ years in California). I don't like some of Wyoming's laws/policies, because IMO they are stupidly repressive due to overt Mormon influence (not as bad as Utah or Idaho, but still) . But, I knew that before I moved there. Anyone with an internet connection can know this in 15 minutes. But, other things I liked were more important to me. Looking back at California, I can say the same thing in reverse. There were things I liked about CA policies, and things I greatly disliked.
Once again I having nothing against you saying that presidential elections do not impact your life significantly... clearly they impact other people's lives.
Given the circumstances I probably have some more nerves to be irritated, but the 3/5 clause is in the Consititution itself. SCOTUS did not have to say a thing about that. In Dred Scott the Court said that Black people were not citizens of the United States.
It’s worse. It would have been a great election issue. The Republicans were scared and offered major concessions right out of the box. The Democrats were in a great position to negotiate something that would lock these rights in, but instead they chose to put up an unpassable ideological statement and now we have a big mess. The women involved in this fiasco live in liberal states and they have all their rights, but they have left poor women in conservative states out to dry with their political malpractice.
In fact Trump appointed the Supreme Court justices who kicked abortion policy down to the states instead of mandating its legality at the federal level.
Exactly this! The only phrase I take issue with is this one, which holds soft expectations for the people of Palestine: "despite playing no role in the October 7 attacks". In order for a Palestinian state to exist and thrive it must be able to resist, overthrow, and exclude extreme groups like Hamas.
Give them the dignity of being responsible for their own house.
Since Oct 7th I became a lot more pro-Israel than before (was nearly 100% neutral just due to historical complexity and distance). The reason is Substackers and others started revealing just how incredibly pro-Hamas and anti-semitic the Gazan population actually is. Hamas isn't some tiny regime that manages to somehow oppress millions of innocents despite having nearly no state infrastructure. They don't need an advanced secret police or surveillance infrastructure, because it seems most Gazans are on their side anyway. There is lots of evidence of this like opinion polls, the way Hamas fighters operate with impunity inside hospitals, the dancing in the streets around the captured hostages, the apparent lack of resistance movements or collaborators who would otherwise help the Israelis overthrow Hamas in return for independence and so on.
This really shook my world view of what dictatorships are like. In the west we like to imagine that totalitarian regimes are made up of a tiny number of thugs at the top, and then millions of innocent people below them who strive for freedom and western values but can't organize due to the ruthless efficiency of some abstract state oppression.
It's easy to forget that regimes are large. Regimes need lots of people to make them work. You can't organize a regime without a LOT of people who really want to take part in it, who share the goals of that regime. With Hamas this is obvious: they sustain a massive fighting force on the back of a small population, implying that most Gazans are either fighters or directly supporting fighters (families, businesses helping the fighters etc). The separation of Gazans and Hamas that underlies the leftist cause might not really exist.
So how many North Koreans are true believers? What percentage of the population are fellow travellers who would try and resurrect the communist state if it were suddenly taken away from them? Today we can ignore this question because it's irrelevant. If North Korea collapsed it would become a much more important question. But it is surely not less than 20% of the population.
At what point does fixing this become the responsibility of people on the inside? Unclear but the bulk of the work must ultimately lie with them.
Hamas are junkyard dogs. A meaner Palestinian version of the IRA (Northern Ireland), that shoot rockets because the Wall prevents them from setting bombs. They're the toughest gang of thugs in the giant open-air prison camp known as Gaza. They rule it with an iron hand, and will kill anyone who challenges their rule.
Gangs aspire to become organized crime, that aspire to become official leadership--if given the chance. A phenomenon that happens in ghettos, reservations, prison camps since time immemorial.
Total Israeli exports 2022, USD $76.9 billion. Palestinian exports 2022, $1.58 billion. Israeli policy squelches free enterprise and entrepreneurialism in the Occupied Territories. Easier to control the natives when they're poor.
I do think the New Left is very much about lifestyle more than policy. I think their real goal is power and the like, and they don’t care anything at all about the policies or people they claim to care about.
From 2015-20 they thought they were the future, and then when the 2020 SC/Super Tuesday primaries hit their future came to a crashing end. The Bernie wing of the movement dumped the Bernie Bros, and went with the Dem Party. Embracing Gaza was their way of climbing back into the mainstream but they don’t care about the Palestinians anymore than they care about working class people or Ukraine.
Got news for you: the "new left" is now mainstream Democratic politics. Actual Biden Administration policy. The entire Biden 2020 plank was copied almost entirely from Sanders' 2016 campaign: Free College, $15 Minimum Wage, Legalizing Marijuana, Criminal Justice Reform, Renewable Energy, and addressing Income Inequality. Throw in protecting a woman's right to choose and you've got current center-of-the-road Dem.
How's that is any way MAGA?
Israel's current--and entirely self-inflicted--PR nightmare will not and cannot be fixed by demonizing a few hundred college demonstrators. Deliberately using famine as a weapon of war will haunt both Israel and the American pro-Israel movement for decades to come. They've dug themselves a very deep hole, and every new photo of starving Gazan children that emerges only deepens it. Some of them eerily look like photos of Nazi death camp survivors.
lol no it really wasn’t. In 2020 the Bernie wing of his movement rolled back into the Democratic Party where they occupied the wing people like McGovern and Ted Kennedy used to occupy while the Bernie bros or dirtbag left veered off. Thats what Noah calls the new left or I call the alt left or OWS left.
Every country should work to reduce their dependence on oil imports as much as possible. We don't want our economies dependent on the drama of the Middle East.
My hope is that China's drive towards energy independence will drive India's drive towards the same goal which will also drive the same behaviour in ASEAN and Europe. In the big four attempting this goal, commodities prices will fall and other developing countries can also leverage new energy technologies.
They would need American expertise to do that which the Biden administration is unlikely to let them do. Also intuitively it seems easier to build transmission lines than a pipeline, but I'm not an expert. Additionally since Chinese solar manufacturers might get hit with tariffs soon, the government is going to speed up deployment to support domestic industry.
It's not called a Strategic Resource for nothing. Keeping a petroleum reserve for wartime use is essential. Which is why the Alaska decision shouldn't be conflated with fracking-generated LNG in the lower 48.
I agree with most of your analysis. However, I think IDF operations are being held to an unreasonable standard. No wars incur zero civilian casualties. When we compare civilian casualties caused by the IDF with other major wars, the civilian-to-combatant casualty rate is unprecedentedly low.
I remember during the 2014 Gaza war, an Israeli general was quoted (anonymously) as saying "the Americans would never tolerate this, as we have. They would bring out the B52's and level the place". I think this is profoundly true. We have never had a military aristocracy, there is no question of honor, just of expediency: how do we win this war as fast as possible?" This could be productively applied to this case: war is bad, starting a war is bad, ending a war is good. Nothing else matters. Letting this go on and on is not doing the Palestinians any favors: it simply delays the point at which they decide that this war is not worth it, that they love their children more.
Had we lost WW2, US & British bomber generals would've be tried as war criminals for the fire-bombings of Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, etc. that mostly killed women and children.
During and after the First Gulf War, we and the Brits systematically bombed the shit out of Iraq's infrastructure. Then we imposed a near total blockade of spare parts to repair said infrastructure. The result was a near collapse of Iraq's sewage treatment plants. An estimated 250k Iraqis--mostly the very young and the very old--died as a result of diarrheal diseases. So, yeah, we're assholes.
That's true. But we didn't lose. Germany and Japan are peaceful and prosperous countries today because we did what we did. We rid the world of extraordinary dangerous regimes whose ideologized populations killed millions of innocents. We paid for this in hundreds of thousands of our lives. We are heroes for that.
As for Iraq, I notice that you don't mention the gangster militias who destroyed their own country and committed mass atrocities starting immediately in the wake of the invasion. This catastrophe should have been foreseen, and we should not have started that war. That's on us. But surely even Arabs can be held responsible for the things they actually did.
Decent people don't respect people who trash their own country and their own fellow citizens to make themselves more socially appealing. It's a parlor game, but with serious consequences.
To blame the Sunni-Shia-Kurd civil war violence on Iraqi "gangsters" is pretty rich, when it was we who lit the match in rather spectacular fashion. If you wish, I could detail the various examples of staggering incompetence a certain GOP administration made in its adventures there that virtually guaranteed--if not accelerated--the scope of the violence. Fighting that unnecessarily cost the US lives and treasure, not to mention up to 1.25m Iraqi lives, and inundated the EU with >2 million refugees.
Your Germany/Japan analogies are entirely correct. After killing perhaps 4.5 million civilians we did turn them into peaceful and prosperous democratic Satrapies. Israel, however, has no such intention regarding their own conquered territories. An eternity of military rule in grinding poverty is all their residents have to look forward to, along with slow-motion ethnic cleansing by the apartheid settler movement. Is it any wonder they rebelled against the Israeli boot on their neck?
Regarding a few hundred non-violent demonstrating college students, what's the big fuss? Their only crime is to have touched a nerve with the pro-Israel crowd who dislike being reminded that a maybe/maybe-not-yet genocide is currently being waged in their name. And if the ongoing famine proceeds as intended later this summer into a mass-fatality event, and photos of thousands of dead emaciated Gazan children who look eerily like Auschwitz victims start hitting the airwaves, then Israel and the pro-Israel movement will be in an epic PR disaster that may never, ever be fixable. In that light, all those arrested and expelled college kids will be redeemed; even seen as martyrs.
Even if the Gaza situation doesn't worsen, Israel and Zionism have lost the American youth. People my age still reflexively stand with Israel; but the under-30 crowd is lost. Perhaps forever. To them, calling in the cops to campus simply worsens the reputation of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, and validates their belief that Zionism is just a system of racist thuggery.
What I especially take issue with, is that if this famine disaster comes to pass, it will return Trump to the WH, and the GOP to the Senate; and severely reduce American soft power internationally. American democracy as we know it may end. And for what? Just so that the Israeli government can proceed with yet another stage of its ethnic cleansing program?
I can only observe that Israel losing the support of the United States will not be better for the Palestinians. Alone, the Israelis are much more dangerous to them than they have been under United States support and restraint. The logic in this situation would be to just finish the Palestinian situation off for good. Many countries would celebrate this: indeed, if the Israelis don't do it, someone else likely will. Having made themselves a danger to world peace with this atrocity, I give the Palestinian national existence a generation, tops. The only question is how many individual Palestinians will survive to tend to the lives and futures of their children, as they should have been doing all along. With luck there will be many.
Israel's exports 2023: $156billion; Palestine's: $1.61 billion. As long as Israel keeps their borders tightly closed, the Palestinian business class will never be able to flourish to become a counterweight to Hamas/PA.
Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7th were horrible, killing 1,200 Israelis. But Israel has already killed >30,000 civilians and most of the Hamas fighters (20,000 ?).
Can you tell me the ratios of this conflict, and of other conflicts? I don’t know how to compare these casualties, but it sounds like you do have the numbers handy!
That Wikipedia article shocked me. I assumed that the Hamas attack had a worse ratio than the Israeli response, but it seems to be saying that both killed 2 civilians for every 1 military death. Neither of those is particularly on the low end, but I had assumed before that Hamas at least was worse than Israel. You now seem to be saying they are doing similarly badly/well.
It’s intellectually dishonest to equate house-by-house rape and torture of civilians with unintentional civilian deaths caused by Hamas using civilians as human shields.
“In the special case of Gaza, moreover, the crowded urban battlefield offers endless opportunities for the easiest of tactics, because contrary to accusations that only expensively educated U.S. college students could possibly believe, Israeli soldiers do not deliberately kill innocent civilians going about their business. Therefore Hamas fighters can be perfect civilians walking alongside women and children right up until the moment they duck into the right doorway to take up prepared weapons and come out shooting.“
That seems right. Still, I was under the impression that the vast majority of Hamas killings had been civilians - now I learn that it's actually no larger than the ratio of Israeli killings.
Keep in mind that if Bibi continues his food blockade of six months and counting, the number of dead Gazans will skyrocket. And those who survive will be physiologically and psychologically scarred for life. After breaking UNWRA, driving out nonprofits like World Central Kitchen, and eliminating the Gazan police who used to escort food convoys, Israel has set in motion a possibly unstoppable mass-casualty catastrophe.
Ironically, the founders of Israel--many of whom were concentration camp survivors--were also survivors of intentional starvation.
I think so too. But it does seem to me like Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties while simultaneously leveling Gaza to the ground. Which is kind of a neat trick.
I am really surprised we haven't seen famine in North Gaza. How is food aid getting to them?
The people moved to the south, and Israel lets food and other aid through. But then it sits on the ground being undistributed, apparently, so there might be famine yet. It won't be due to lack of food but distribution issues.
Kenny, are you familiar with A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry (ACOUP)? It's a wonderful blog by a military historian, Brett Devereaux. Here's an informative post on civilian casualties in war, historically and today: https://acoup.blog/2023/12/08/fireside-friday-december-8-2023/
The elite colleges are losing their donor class billionaires and such, while gaining absolutely nothing for the fling. Was in college in the late 60's, early 70's, and thought back then, the Presidents needed to get real with the protestors. They didn't and college ceased to be a search for truth and became a means of well paid jobs and fund raising. That is no way to educate a nation.
The US wasn’t concerned about standoff attacks in Fallujah, or when the US idiotically allied itself with Iran’s Shia Islamist proxies in fighting ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa. It's also incorrect to compare October 7 to the Ukraine war - Russia didn't start that war with atrocities like a cross-border attack intentionally targeting thousands of civilians with torture, rape, sadistic executions and abductions. October 7 is far more like September 11, and I'll remind you, since you're so concerned about casualty ratios, that the US killed far more civilians as it was justly pursuing the destruction of Al Qaeda, after suffering 3000 victims in the Islamist terror attacks of 9/11, than Israel has killed Palestinian civilians in its just pursuit of destroying Hamas.
Nobody serious can consider Mousa Al-Gharbi as anything but an anti-Israel propagandist. The proof that his theory is idiotic gaslighting is how many anti-jewish attacks are happening across the US and EU, diaspora Jews being attacked by Muslims and far leftists. I've never seen far-right protests attacking Jewish students daily on hundreds of university campuses, and Jewish businesses and places of worship all around the US.
There's an interesting statistical trick played where "right-wing antisemitism" is not defined as antisemitism (eg: hate crimes) by people who self-affiliate with the Republican Party but people who give conservative answers on issue surveys. You wouldn't call them leftists, more conservative Democrats, but the mere fact of being a Democrat means that calling it a systematically "right-wing" problem is straight lying: if you have 10 Democrats in a room and one of them is a Nazi, you have 10 Nazis.
Noah, you didn’t mention the American hostages, no one does, not even the President. Is it because you don’t care?
Here they are. Edan Alexander, Itai Chen, Sagui Dekel-Chen, Omer Neutra, Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Keith Siegel.
You’re supposed to be a math guy.
In terms of population the hostages that were take, if the same representative number of hostages were taken in the united states it would be around 7000. The number of dead? About 40,000.
What is anti-semitic is the world expecting Israel to go over an above what other countries are expected to do, had there countries been savagely ravaged. You put a blame on Israels behavior.
Let’s look at that. Do you see Israeli citizens dancing in the streets over the death of Palestinians? I don’t, but I sure saw Palestinians on Oct. 7th dance. The mothers and fathers who received the videos of their sons killing Jews, they sure were celebrating
.
Can you tell me exactly who is in charge of the Palestinian Peace movement? Who is the Palestinian Mandela or Gandhi or even who their MLK is? I can’t. Can you tell me, how many times Arab Nations tried to eradicate Israel? How many Jews have been killed by Palestinian Terrorists? School buses raked by gunfire? An Olympic Team kidnapped and killed? How many suicide bombers killed?
While we can of course discuss the lproblems of settlements, and it is destabilizing, why is the behavior of Palestinians never discussed?
Had something similar happened in America with the numbers I expressed above, just how would expect America to act. We leveled Iraq and Afghanistan over a few thousand....Imagine if 40,000 had been killed. As for the poor Palestinians, they voted in Hamas. They dance in the streets....I remember a photo in Gaza of a group of 6 year olds in Hamas garb, I believe there were meant to die for Allah.
Their parents did this.....The Palestinians haven’t exactly dropped themselves in responsible and sincere behavior. There leaders have consistently called for the destruction of Israel in Arabic while making peaceful pronouncements in English to satisfy the stupid Americans and Europeans so they keep sending money.
The Palestinians do not want Peace, they want to see the death of Jews. It’s what they have wanted for decades. When you find that Palestinian Peace movement, lemme know. I’ve been waiting for one since 1967.
Your Steelman argument is "Israel has done bad things to the Palestinian people, which is bad, and not what the US would do." I think the steelman argument that moves people to protest is that Israel has been using this tragedy to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank, including using famine as a weapon of collective punishment. For what its worth, Israel has also killed multiple US citizens in this war.
Israel is one of the US's closest allies, and the US continues its military support to this day, a clear endorsement the their actions. This seems to be putting US citizens and military abroad at greater risk with no clear benefit to the US.
Also, your claim that Palestinian demands for the right of return represents "a call for a return to the law of the jungle, where nations press ancient land claims with invasion, ethnic cleansing and genocide"? Noah there are people still alive who were forced from their homes in 1948, that's hardly an "ancient land claim". Wouldn't that be the Israeli claim to the land which is based off religious texts thousands of years old?
The Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries waged a genocidal war against Israel in 1948. That Palestinian population that fled or retreated will not be returning, there is a consequence for losing wars. The Indian Muslims, Pakistani Hindus and Sudeten Germans will also not be returning to the places they came from.
Thucydides knew a lot about war, including the fact that soft intellectuals idea of moral philosophy is not part of it. This was his whole point. If you want an American expression of it, it is: “War is hell. It is cruelty and you cannot refine it.”
Sudeten Germans were expelled at about the same time as Palestinians. The Czech Republic joined the Schengen region in 2007 and now Germans can go back if they want to. It's possible to move on from past grievances.
One difference is that the Sudeten Germans had a Germany to go to: what makes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict so intractable is that _both_ sides believe they have no homeland other than the one they're fighting over.
You mean the Muslims who were leftover in India after the partition and population transfers that are estimated to have killed a million people? Let me know when the Indian government welcomes the Muslims who were moved to Pakistan back, I'm sure it will be happening any day now.
In Israel, there are 2 million Arab citizens. They enjoy more political rights than any other Arab in the Middle East, simply because Israel is the only liberal democracy in the region. Today, an Israeli IDF Muslim Arab soldier was killed in the war in Gaza, and quite a few such soldiers have already been killed while fighting for Israel. Hamas murdered and kidnapped many Israeli Arab civilians on October 7.
If Israel kills every single last Hamas fighter, nobody will miss them. Even most Arab states dislike or barely tolerate the Palestinians.
But if Israel crosses the line into genocide--as it seems to want to--will create a moral and diplomatic stain that will be impossible to wash out. Policies to intentionally starve to death a population of 2.3 million civilians--half of them children--even if only partly successful, will be an absolute catastrophe for Israel.
Most of the right wing parties in Israel speak of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Judah and Samaria. They represent about 30% of Jewish citizens. Some politicians do in fact speak openly of genocide, but they are the fringe.
There have been, and are frequent crimes and communal riots against Indian Muslims. The current government stokes this with inflammatory statements. "Constitutional secularism" can't do much about this.
Does that justify Israel currently waging a possibly genocidal war against Gaza? Of the 2.3 million Gazans who are being intentionally starved to death, about a million are children. Is this something you advocate?
You are saying things that are not connected to reality. Gaza has the cheapest food prices in the Middle East because they are flooded with humanitarian aid. It is true that there was a period when Hamas took control of the food trucks in Rafah before they reached the north of the Strip, causing famine in the north of the Strip. Israel opened a crossing in the north of the Strip and the problem was solved.
Are they using famine as collective punishment though? They've been allowing a lot of food trucks through that aren't getting distributed on the Gazan side because the UN isn't distributing it. Why not, well, maybe because UNRWA is full of Hamas supporters and Hamas seem to consistently use Gazans as pawns in the war. It helps Hamas to have Gazans be starving because it inflames leftists in the west, so why distribute food? Better to leave it sitting in cargo yards:
Targeting the largest relief agency in Gaza as well as international NGOs (such as the strike on World Central Kitchen) while imposing a blockade of food and electricity, clearly demonstrates that Israel is using famine as a weapon.
(Not sure why I'm supposed to be impressed with citing the IDF?)
So you're asserting the photos of food cargo waiting to be distributed inside Gaza is all lies and propaganda then, and in reality aid shipments are all being turned around at the border? Can you show that is the case? Who are the aid agencies that are being shown being delivered through then, do they not really exist at all?
I wouldn't put too much stock any IDF statements, btw. They're fighting a war and will say pretty much anything at this point.
The point is that if the current food blockade devolves into a mass-casualty event, with thousands of photos of dead or dying Gazan children looking like emaciated Nazi death camp inmates, Israel will be in enormously deep shit. A hole so deep, that not even light will escape it. The fallout from Sabra & Shatila will look utterly tame by comparison.
Israeli leadership either doesn't know, or doesn't care. Given the public comments by Smotrich et al, the money's on 'doesn't care'.
The "ancient land claim" argument implies that one set of people on the ground should expel and murder another set of people on the ground simply because they don't want to live among them. This is pretty much how racial segregation happened in the United States, and is the foundation of endless barbaric acts in history. Is this what you call "civilized"?
I do wonder how much protesters grapple with the not unlikely outcome that an American break-up with Israel could mean a more brutal Israeli reckoning with Palestine.
What can be "more brutal" than deliberately starving to death 2.3 million civilians? Half of them children.
An American break-up would have the opposite effect. Without US diplomatic cover, Israel would've suffered a similar outcome as apartheid South Africa. Like decades ago.
While that is a possibility.. I think you're far too confident. The current trend of Geopolitics is towards bloc conflict... if the US drops Israel, it's fairly likely that Russia or China is willing to adopt them. After all, Russia is bedfellows w/ Assad, who has been just as brutal if not more so than Israel. If you want to know what is more brutal than the hypothetical of 2.3 million civilians dying... it would be 2.3 million civilians actually dying. I do not deny the brutality of the Israeli actions, but to imagine it can not get worse is highly naive.
Unfortunately South Africa is not a good analogue. Pressure against South Africa occurred during a unipolar moment, with a group in power that was outnumbered and had limited options. Israel of today is in a different situation, and if we're assessing possible future outcomes, we need to be open to the idea that the US might be a restraining influence on Israel, and that removing that influence could lead to worse rather than better outcomes for Palestinians.
It might have a paradoxical result, in that freeing Israel to beat the Palestinians into submission would end the war so that future Palestinian generations can tend to their lives and families in peace.
I started reading “Invisible Bridge”, btw, and despite the illuminating narrative, it really comes across as “bitter Boomer leftist grievance on crack”.
I thought it felt like a historian who started off trying to chronicle a movement he thought was bad, and ended up sympathizing with that movement more than he expected to.
The portrait of Reagan in that book is certainly more multidimensional than the Reagan I remember being president (the Bork hearings were a fundamental political experience for me in high school). But the contemporary political parallels weren't as obvious as in "Nixonland" so Perlstein could tell himself that it was important that the readers understood what early Reagan supporters thought and felt.
Or Trumpland. Especially this latest hush money trial. Who wouldn't pay $160,000 in hush money to cover up a fling with a porno-actress? And then falsify records to make it out as a business expense?
I wish I had your confidence about the failure of these protests, inane and immoral though they may be.
The first challenge is that so many young people today (and many who are not so young) fundamentally see Israel as colonial implant in the middle east. They have been sold this line for so long is has become the perceived (un)wisdom.
The second challenge is that I don't see the far left in America or for that matter Australia correcting their underlying ignorance and/or wilful blindness to the sheer awfulness of Hamas, Iran and Syria to their own people, which far exceeds anything that Israel is doing. The same applies to the refusal of the left or even most Moslem states to recognise what is truly a genocide against the Uighur in Xinjiang.
My conclusion is that ultimately this is about anti-semitism, based on the exceptionalism they impute to Israel.
The proof of this - unfortunately - will come when there is no change in the protests even when Netanyahu is justifiably defenestrated, and a more reasonable government without Ben-Givir and Smotrich is formed. This will happen even if this new government actually tries to negotiate a two state deal, as I believe it should.
"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" is still relevant here. I agree that a good slice of the undercurrent is antisemitism, but, paradoxically, another slice is just seeing Israel as a Western country. They're "one of us", and thus not subject to the blanket multiculturalism pass that allows Islamic countries to be misogynistic and occasionally barbaric without being censured for it.
The other point I would make that identifying anti-semitism as part of Israel's challenge of maintaining global legitimacy, let alone sympathy, and therefore dismissing the issue, is not a solution.
Yes it isn't fair, and in fact it is downright evil, but that just makes it more urgent that Israel finds a deal with its neighbours that gets it out of the morass of an occupation that is now nearly 60 years old, and other than for a messianic maniac fringe was surely never part of Israel's 1948 or 1967 strategy.
Neither of the actual parties to the conflict want a two-state "solution." It is only a solution to outsiders who are dismayed by the conflict and want it to end so they don't have to think about it anymore. The Israelis don't want a terrorist entity on their borders, and the Palestinians will be satisfied with nothing except the removal of the Jews from the entire area. Until this changes (or until the weaker party is defeated), the war will go on.
There are factions on both sides who want a two state solution, because it's the only realistic path to peace. Unfortunately those factions are out of power on both sides.
The two-state solution is not a path to peace, rather a possible result of peace. With peace, much is possible. Without peace, nothing is possible. At this point, Palestinians would rather have war, so the question of a two-state solution is irrelevant until they change their minds, or are decisively defeated.
Douglas Martin. Since the end of the second intifada(2005), it appears the most likely result of peace is further expansion of the settlements and dispossession of Palestinians, not advancement toward a two state solution. Per Haaretz reports, Netanyahu supported Hamas in Gaza so that he would have no one to negotiate with and so that promotion of working toward a two-state solution could be ignored as impossible. Opinion polls swing back and forth but in March 2024, over 60% of Gazans polled broadly in favor of a two-state solution. A genuine, good faith, effort by an Israeli government to create an independent state for Palestinians conditioned on it bringing a enduring peace has not been tried since the assassination of Rabin in 1995.
It seems that you imagine that the Israelis can rustle up peace out of thin air. Do you feel that the Palestinians might have something to do with this? Or are they absolved of any responsibility? Because they're pathetic, or brown, or indigenous, or something? Do you think it's fine to torture and murder people over some kind of property dispute?
Netanyahu has been where he is for all these years, because Arafat put him there by means of the Second Intifada. Arafat's treachery, and the hundreds of dead he caused by barbaric means, destroyed the Israeli peace party and made Netanyahu's accession - and his indulgence of the settlers - inevitable. That is what made the two-state plan impossible and irrelevant. It, like the wall, and Gaza, are simply consequences of Palestinian misbehavior. As this latest atrocity shows, the Israelis couldn't make peace with those people if they tried.
Every morning 9.5 million Israeli citizens -- 7 million Jewish, 2 million Palestinian, 1/2 million other -- get up and get along. That peace wasn't rustled up. It's the product of being consistently civil, sporadically friendly, doggedly engaged. Both sides are smart enough to have noticed that when you're nice to someone, almost always they're nice back. If you believe it is impossible to get along with someone, you absolve yourself from the effort of trying. But Palestinian, Jew or Other, we have to be smart enough to see we really have no choice, win or lose, but to try to preserve the peace we have and create more for our children and grandchildren. Israelis know how to do it; they're doing it.
I think Olmert made a genuine attempt as recently as 2008. Abbas refused to engage. How genuine was the Olmert Plan? It even included Israel building a tunnel at its own expense linking Gaza with Ramallah!
Not true. Camp David in 2000 was a good effort as was Annapolis.
Isn't the biggest obstacle to any kind of compromise peace the fact that the Palestinian nation itself was born in violent struggle against Zionism?
In 1920 anti-Jewish riots broke out in Jerusalem in which the rioters cried out "Faisal is our King" (referring to a Hashemite monarch based in Damascus), demonstrating that Palestinian Arabs had been violently resisting Zionism before they had even begun to self-identify as Palestinians.
And the main thing that differentiates Palestinians from other Levantine Arabs was the Nakba of 1948, with the dream of undoing that trauma by destroying Israel (and symbolized for example by the key representing homes seized by the Zionists) being the very essence of Palestinian identity.
Denazifying Germany was possible because Germany had already been a united nation-state for 62 years before the Nazis took over, while the notion of a "German nation" had existed since the 16th century (eg "Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation"). A Germany after Nazism was conceivable because a Germany before Nazism had existed.
By contrast it is impossible for the Palestinians to make peace with Israel as long as they identify as Palestinians: the conflict could end only with a total Palestinian victory (the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Levant) or a total Israeli victory, which would mean either the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from historic Palestine (as Meir Kahane advocated), or that the Palestinians be beaten down to the extent that they cease to identify as Palestinians (ie that Israel roughly does to the Palestinians what Russia wants to do to the Ukrainians).
If anyhing, I suspect the "Israel/Palestine from the river to the see" is more popular in their respective fan clubs in the West
PLO accepted the two-state solution in 1987
Followed by the first and second intifada. Peace was always tactical for Arafat. Talk is cheap.
The first Intifada was before that (ok, I was wrong in the date of the acceptance of the 2-state solution; it was 1988 and not 1987). If anything, the acceptance of the 2SS was a result of First Intifada
About the 2nd, has nothing to do with the 2SS vs. 1SS, but about the details of the delimitation of the 2 states (and, as direct cause, Ariel Sharon entering in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, who is in the territory claimed by the Palestinian Authority); and the PLO-inspired (I am talking about PLO, not about Hamas) actions during the 2nd Intifada were in the occupied territories, not in Israel.
Why the Intifada prompted the acceptance of the 2.state solution: because changed the center of gravity of the Palestinian struggle from the diapora refugees, wanting to "return", to the Palestinians in the territories, who have the occupation as the main problem (and also was an example of a change who started in the 80s: the repletion of "People's War" - guerrilla war - by "People's Power - mass insurrection - by main form of struggle)
Ancient history, invalidated by events and today wholly irrelevant. Arafat was, first, lying, and now dead. The currently alive Palestinian so-called leadership and the overwhelming majority of Palestinians themselves are all in on the River to the Sea thing which envisions something other than any number of states with Jews in it. Meanwhile, the Second Intifada destroyed the Israeli peace party, so, today, in 2024, the war continues, there will be no negotiated peace. Consequences. Palestinians could end the war at any time, but they don’t yet want to. At the moment, they love it more than they love their own children. Surrender is the only door out of their dilemma, and if they won’t walk through it themselves, they will have to be kicked through it, for the sake of world peace.
The problem with this argument is that the protesters keep being more right than wrong. I've been arguing with a pro-Palestinian friend since October 8th about how bad Hamas is, how Israel has a right to defend itself, etc. And yet everything he predicted about IDF overreach and murder of civilians, aid workers, etc. has come to pass and been backed up repeatedly. I roughly agree with Noah that his position is wrong and leads to a set of dead-end goals, but it'd be nice if the Israeli government could just make the smallest effort to stop digging the hole deeper.
Some sympathy with this view. You may find this interesting.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-798420
I agree with this. I think some folks in the 1990s thought that the two-state peace process was some kind of sop to Palestine, when in practice the smarter folks in power realized that solving the Palestinian occupation was critical to the national security of Israel. Unfortunately the Israeli right was unable to think long-term about this and now all of the damage is coming to pass, exactly as could have been predicted. I'm very pessimistic about the long-term prospects for Israel.
You don't have to even address the moral complexities of the issue to see that it's going to weaken any long-term military alliance Israel might have built with its neighbors.
The real issue here is the six-month near total Israeli blockade of food, medicine, and potable water to 2.3 million civilians, half of them children. Young children are now literally starving to death in Gaza. An Israeli policy of using famine as a weapon of war may or may not be genocide at present. But if not corrected it soon will be.
Is this a policy that you want to defend?
There is no "near total blockade". Tens of thousands of truckloads have been let into Gaza in the last 6 months. Israel provides plenty of water to Gaza. All this while the Gaza authorities are holding over 100 Israelis hostage.
UNICEF says that hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza are malnourished and dozens are dying of it every week. I find them more credible than you. What is the source for your claim that Gaza is getting enough food?
The fact is more food etc is now going into Gaza than it was before the war. The real issue is the poor control over its distribution.
Over the past four weeks, an average of about 140 trucks carrying food and other aid have arrived in Gaza each day, according to a database maintained by UNRWA, the U.N. agency that supports Palestinians. But the World Food Program estimates that 300 trucks of food are needed daily to begin to meet people’s basic food needs.
As of Tuesday, about 1,200 trucks were waiting at El Arish in Egypt, including more than 800 containing food supplies.
Not according to the New York Times. What is the source to your claim that more food is going into Gaza than before the war?
Also the entire population is now dependent on food delivery while before us was 1/3. Are Gazans getting more calories per capita?
From the NYT article referenced
“ Aid headed into northern Gaza has to pass through one of two other Israeli checkpoints. Aid agencies, citing Israeli restrictions, security issues and poor road conditions, have largely stopped deliveries to the north.”
The protests will end when the killing of civilians in Palestine ends. The protestors are there out of a sense of human decency and empathy. You bizarrely label this as "anit-semitism."
It's of course delicious irony to see them spread widely across college campuses after you and Noah claim that they were the rantings of a few extremist lunatics. Gen Z is positively being radicalized by this experience.
I wonder if the anti-Zionism of the UK's Socialist Workers Party is rooted in the fact that one of its pivotal figures was Tony Cliff (née Yigael Gluckstein) who was born to a Zionist family in Mandate Palestine?
In the Mandate era Zionism was much more of a "colonial implant in the Middle East" than it ended up being, when the original Zionist colonists of the New Yishuv were supplemented after World War II, first by Holocaust survivors from Europe, and then by Middle Eastern Jews fleeing the pogroms that broke out across the Middle East in response to the Nakba.
Young People
A good deal of attention relating to American public opinion on the Middle East has centered on the protests on college campuses around the country. This is not unexpected. Sympathy for the Palestinians has traditionally been higher among younger than among older Americans, even though across the 2000s and 2010s, young people on average remained more sympathetic toward the Israelis than toward the Palestinians, with not a lot of change over this period.
But the past five years have seen 18- to 29-year-olds’ sympathies shift to the point where they are roughly evenly divided between the two Middle East antagonists. This makes them by far the most pro-Palestinian of any age group. (There has been little significant change in the proportion of the U.S. population who are 18-29 over time.)
As someone who sympathizes with the Palestinians and abhors the current Israeli government, I actually completely agree with this piece.
Yeah, isn't it strange? I went well over a decade loathing what Israel had been doing ever since Sharon was their PM, and here I am brushing off the crazies who are calling the Israelis genocidal white colonizers (Israel does a lot of bad things, but that isn't a charge that makes any sense at all). It's odd, do say the least.
I do think the Israelis are colonizers, especially the ongoing settlements in the West Bank. But the Zionist project started well over 100 years ago, many Israelis are 3rd generation or more and it would be as wrong to uproot them from their homes in Israel proper as was the Nakba. There needs to be good faith governance working towards coexistence in Gaza and Israel and we have neither!
I haven’t been to a Palestine protest (I don’t support blocking freeways) so I don’t know whether a lot of these accusations Noah talks about these provocateurs are genuine, but I trust he is at least arguing from what he thinks is true. I certainly think there’s a Substack crowd constantly crying wolf about anti-Semitism for sure, most folks who say the protestors are anti-Semitic are full of shit. Most folks I know that say they support Palestine are not saying the ridiculous things people have talked about. I would say I know very few people who support what Israel is doing at this stage of the conflict. A fair amount of folks were happy at the very beginning that Palestine did something to strike back against their oppression, but no one loves Hamas’ tactics, and it would have made a lot more sense for this to have come out of the WB than Gaza. But no one i know believes that Jews are the problem, just the Israeli right wing and its American enablers, and they’ll all hold their nose and vote for Biden bc they know Trump is worse, even if they don’t love him (for the record, I think Biden is perfectly fine, though I wish the Dems would nominate Mark Kelly instead!)
But I am coming around to the idea that there’s a big failure to police the worst extremes of the movement, and that it’s probably worst at colleges bc at that age people are just more zealous and don’t get the world is basically a giant gray area yet. In Seattle there definitely is a shrill and absolutist side of the left that’s a loud, counterproductive minority. And when they block the freeway I’m like dudes you’re hurting your cause. Go to Tel Aviv and protest there!
Sigh, to clarify: what crazy-ass Israeli settlers do is obviously stealing land. It's illegal under international law and we shouldn't tolerate it, but right-wing Israeli governments kind of tacitly allow it because they are right-wing ass clowns.
The point I was making is the accusation leveled against Israel (white-supremacist colonizers) lacks any kind of nuance; I don't think those people are talking about the right-wing settlers, I think they're talking about Israel proper. As you said, if THAT were the problem, the fighting would be in the West Bank, not in Gaza.
Next, I'd point out that while I think you're basically right, you should also be aware that Hamas has been artificially propped up for years by Netanyahu as a tactic for not having to deal with the Palestinians. "Look, they're divided, look, Hamas are psychos, we can't deal with them!" and so they never had to resume talks. Hamas also, over time, had been starting to moderate ever so slightly. What happened on October 7th was, a dangerous wing of Hamas felt like they needed to try to strike Israel, do what they could to derail the normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia, draw attention to their conflict, provoke an over-reaction, and possibly also get Iran involved. They succeeded wildly on almost all of these goals (except derailing the talks; those appear to just be paused and, shockingly, most of the other Arab states around the area are helping Israel, directly or indirectly).
What I asked a moment ago, and would ask anyone again is, are we certain that the crazy left freaking out about this conflict and spouting off ignorant takes isn't just getting this garbage from online sources, and possibly from Russia? Why are they doing this and not freaking out about Ukraine? I think, and have thought, this is all highly suspect.
It's not that weird that other Arab states are helping Israel. The more militant elements of the Palestinian cause are either off-shoots of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas and other jihad groups) or offshoots of the PLO/Fatah/PFLP.
Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia all have had significant conflicts with some or all of these groups. The Islamist groups were responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, the others for a variety of successful and attempted assassinations of Jordanian prime ministers and monarchs over the last 50-60 years.
After Mohamed Morsi was deposed in Egypt following a turbulent presidency, the Muslim Brotherhood was banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. This is one of the big reasons why those countries don't want Palestinian refugees, they feel elements of the Palestinian cause are a direct threat to their governments.
Completely agree!
You do know that the Zionists bought and paid for their land? From rich Arab landlords who lived in comfortable places like Beirut and who never saw the peasants who worked to give them their income. Does this make them “colonizers”?
Until there was war and they just forced the rest of them off, right? But yes, I mean the British “bought” most of America from the Natives too, for beads and blankets, but they forced the sale or just took whatever they wanted. Israel is definitely a Jewish colony made up of settlers from around the world. They bought some of it and gained the rest through British partitioning, asset seizure, war, terrorism, assassinations, creating a surveillance state, etc.
Not that the Palestinians are the best at making the case for themselves, they’d do a lot better if they pushed for coexistence, even though they were there before the Jews started returning from their diaspora due to persecution in Europe. But the Israelis are sneaky (the settlements plus all the political assassinations and spying on their allies) and heavy-handed af which keeps them far from any moral high ground. Plus their leaders support Trump (I can forgive genocide, but not this).
The Israelis and Palestinians are both trying to genocide the other. We should not be supporting either side except for towards a lasting peace.
"There was war." This is like saying "mistakes were made." Abstraction. There is a subject and an object here. The subject, in this case, is the Arab League and the for-real fascist Palestinian leaders, who initiated this war. This war continues to this very day, as do the necessities of war that are the opposite of law and justice.
The cold logic of the situation is this: regardless of anybody's idea of rights and wrongs, the war has now become a danger to world peace, and needs to be ended, on any terms. This is impossible so long as the Palestinians hang on to the idea that they have a right and a religious duty to massacre and expel the Israelis so they won't have to live on equal terms with infidels. But the Palestinians still passionately love this idea and they won't quit by themselves. So for the war to end, they have to be made to quit, by threat or actuality of overwhelming force. This is cruel, but not as cruel as endless war over the generations.
The faster and more forcefully this happens, the less Palestinian suffering, and the more Palestinian survivors there will be. And their grandchildren will be able to actually live in the land of Palestine, between the river and the sea, at peace with their Jewish neighbors. There is no other pathway to this. The outpouring of world support has the consequence of delaying this process and ensuring endless war and endless suffering for the people they claim to support. It is not the moral high ground, it is cruelty and self-indulgence. So spare me the words.
Very excellent analysis. Spot on. Completely agree.
It's like these violent crazy branch of leftists are pumping energy into MAGA.
A famous philosopher once said, "Stupid is as Stupid does"
"...violent crazy branch of leftists"
WaPo and NYT--which I read daily--have noted that the protests have been almost entirely non-violent, so you might want to delete that particular adjective. Repeat: these are almost entirely peaceful protesters.
Just like with the Vietnam War protesters, the Black Lives Matter protesters, the Anti-Globalism protesters, this current batch of anti-Genocide in Gaza protesters are also a mixed bag of good, bad, and everything in-between; brought together to protest what they see as state-sanctioned injustice.
Some of these Columbia protesters are clearly antisemitic; while many are actually Jews who are disgusted with the brutality of the Netanyahu regime's intentional starvation of over a million children. But none of those college kids should be labelled antisemitic or crazy simply for criticizing Israeli government policy.
No
Parsing the definitional degree of the protesters’ antisemitism is beside the point. The problem is that they are out of line in their behavior, which goes well beyond protected speech and more importantly that there is a double standard about enforcing this. Jewish students deserve fair treatment from these feckless college administrators who have detailed codes of conduct that they are unwilling to enforce. These kids are purportedly adults but seem unaware of their obligations of citizenship. Being suspended or expelled from school might lead to a useful train of thought for them.
But aren’t words violence ?
Your words wound me deeply!
But seriously, there is such a thing as 'hate speech', as well as verbal threats of violence. But since this thread is about what or what does not constitute Antisemitism by college kids currently protesting Israel's maybe-maybe-not-quite-yet genocide in Gaza, let's investigate semantics: "From the River to the Sea", for example, has radically diverse meanings depending on who's saying it. To Ben-Gvir Smotrich, and other ultra-right member's of Bibi's cabinet, in Hebrew it's an ethno-nationalist call for a Jews-only Greater Israel from the Jordan River to the Med. To a Hamas supporter it's the opposite. Most of the kids protesting on campus probably have no clue of that slogan's deeper meanings, and just like it because it rhymes nicely.
Did you read the column, bruv?
Yes. Noah writes well; but I don't agree with his premise on this one., that students protesting for a 2-State solution are antisemitic or leftist dead-enders.
Agreed. And that’s what makes all the more repellent. All these well-meaning intelligent people keeping company with some of the worst people on the planet, and importing a foreign conflict to our shores. But I don’t think they’re protesting for a two-state solution. It may make you feel better to think they are, but this is quite a novel interpretation of “from the river to the sea”
In Hebrew, among the Haredi wingnuts, that is the connotation. What? You didn't think Judaism has its' own share of wingnuts?
Actually, I studied with Zalman Schacter, who was born and raised strict Orthodox, but was essentially ejected from their ranks. He's considered one of the most influential Rabbis of the entire Jewish Reformed movement, here in the US. Amazing man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalman_Schachter-Shalomi
I wonder if Putin was helping these violent crazy leftists precisely _in order to_ drive votes to MAGA Republicans?
The US does do stand-off attacks, for example, when laying siege to Raqqa during the Isis War. Israel gets in trouble doing the same because Egypt has refused to admit ordinary people who want to escape Gaza. So they’re just there when Israel attacks. When Us did it, the civilians were able to take refuge in other parts of Syria. But Egypt is like, “eat lead” to the Palestinians. Of course, Egypt has its reasons. It doesn’t want refugees; gazans are inbred; it doesn’t want to help Israel cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. But like, no, the US has done and would do the same thing as Israel is doing now.
If Hamas had shown up in say, New Jersey, and went on the same murder, rape, kidnapping rampage that they did in southern Israel, I am confident the US would have reacted similarly to how we reacted to 9-11. Pretty sure there are a lot more deceased civilians due to the US reaction than in Gaza.
This entire anti "colonialism" and "settlers" movement is insane. Every freaking piece of dirt on this planet has been colonized and settled over and over again. The present movement seems only concerned with European colonialism. They apparently want geopolitical boundaries to revert to a map from 1490. And all places must be populated strictly based on race. At least, I think that's what they want. But more likely is that they have no idea what they want.
Yes, I always thought it was insane for woke people to insist that western countries must be beacons of multiculturalism, but also that countries in the global south must be ethnostates drawn along historic tribal boundaries, since there is obviously no way Africans etc could ever handle racial diversity.
Woke people used to insist that western countries must be beacons of multiculturalism.
Now they insist that hat western countries must be ethnically cleansed of colonial settler white people. What do you think "de-colonized" means?
...aren't most of the advocates for this position "colonial settler white people" themselves?
Yes. They are hypocrites. They should either relocate to a white place in Europe (by paddleboat, so as to not release any carbon), or kill themselves (in a climate friendly way). Maybe the vexing problem is how they can be cremated or otherwise decompose without releasing carbon?
The good news is tat most of them won't reproduce, and few few who do will "trans-sterilize" their kids so at least no more generations after that.
Hypocrisy is hardly the worst crime. Perhaps, though, if such hypocrisy were pointed out to such people it might encourage a rethink?
(Eg they're likely to respond to such an accusation with something like "it's not my fault, my ancestors moved here before I was born"; which could be an opportunity to humbly suggest extending the same charity to Israeli Jews, and more generally to refrain from demonising people for immutable characteristics.
Vibes? Papers? Essays?
Palestine was an especially conquered and re-conquered place, throughout history. It's insane to me that "indigineity" is a concept applied to this land in the 1940s.
When people are forced to live in ghettoes and are treated like garbage by the powers that control them, they can get pretty upset. Most of the Occupied Territories have been under direct or indirect Israeli military rule since 1967, which has intentionally kept them weak and poor. The closest the US has come to anything like what Hamas did last Fall have been inner-city ghetto riots, like Watts.
But unlike the US, where you can either leave the ghetto or rez; or stay and do something entrepreneurial, Gazans are kept locked down pretty tight by Israel. If you'd been confined to a ghetto because of your race or religion for 56 years, you'd probably get a bit testy too, eh?
You have the causality entirely backwards. In fact, Israel's disengagement from Gaza was a critical test for your theory. After failed attempts at a negotiated peace, it was thought Israel should just try to unilaterally end the occupation on the theory that it's the occupation that fuels Palestinian rage making it impossible to reach a negotiated settlement. So Israel ended all the things that were claimed to fuel Palestinian rage. Settlements, roadblocks, administrative detentions, military control. Yet, what happened was the following chain of events: Hamas took power and turned Gaza into a launchpad for attacks on Israel, Israel, Egypt, and the rest of the world retaliated by imposing a blockade, Israel was falsely accused of turning Gaza into a concentration camp, Hamas continued its attacks on Israel and continues to build up it's military arm, yer every military response Israel staged was decried as overly brutal. Now here we are. It is quite clear your theory has failed a critical test. All indications are that if Israel were to try the same in the West Bank, things would in literal rivers of blood. The fundamental problem is Palestinians aren't willing to give up their dream of annihilating Israel. As long as that is the case, unilaterally ending the occupation should never again even be considered by anyone with a shred of humanity.
No, they are confined to the ghetto because of their past behavior. Talking past this does not change history.
This all reads as very correct to me, especially the parts about how so many of their protests seem so utterly pointless. Where I live, early on, some of the Free Palestine-rs took over a freaking art museum because the restaurant inside it did a thing (or did not do a thing? Can't remember) that somehow offended some supporters of the Palestinian cause. This was like RIGHT after 10/7.
Which is how we ended up with people just going to the freaking museum and being confused why these insane people were screaming at them.
I'm sure that message really got through to the Bibi regime, though, definitely.
Obligatory:
https://babylonbee.com/news/you-know-these-fine-citizens-may-really-have-a-point-and-id-like-to-learn-more-about-their-cause-thinks-driver-blocked-by-protesters-for-3-hours
Of course, the 1970s also remembered as the period of Nixon and “Silent Majority” backlash against those movements that bled out their mass ideal by that point.
The dates don’t perfectly align with the decades (because reality doesn’t confirm to just round years), but I think that thesis seems right… it’s just that that period also did lead to a backlash against the Democratic Great Society and the Civil Rights Acts.
Just because these extreme movements are on their last legs doesn’t mean they don’t burn the house down on their way out.
It's disgusting that this faction of the left is using the legitimate suffering of Palestinians to sow chaos here at home. They're not interested in helping, they just want to watch everything burn in exchange for an infinitesimally small chance that they'll be able to reshape society. They're willing to let tens of millions of Americans suffer under another Republican led administration from the safety of their privileged positions
"tens of millions of Americans suffer under another Republican led administration"
Huh? I'm in my 60s. I've lived through several different Republican and Democrat led administrations. Have yet to live through one where tens of millions of Americans suffered under any of them. For the most part, life is identical under both.
I think it’s fair to say that electoral consequences can be personal. Pretty clearly someone with an unwanted pregnancy in texas now versus 6 years ago has a pretty drastically different life.
Pretty unfair to assume that a lack of electoral consequences for you or for me means that there is not major consequences for other Americans.
Has nothing to do with the which presidential administration and everything to do with state law. If full term abortion is important to you, move to a different state. I would never live in Utah or Alabama (having nothing to do with abortion). Democrats controlled all three branches of government when Roe overturned. Did they immediately pass some federal law? No. And not because would get stuck down by courts. But because they would lose it as an election issue.
Trump or Biden (both terrible choices imo) will not make a difference in state abortion laws.
I do not follow your logic. If abortion was (for a long time) a federally decided matter and it suddenly becomes a state matter (because of federal appointments) that does not suddenly make federal elections inconsequential.
Your claim was that presidential elections don't cause distinct difference in quality of life. If Hilary had been elected instead of Trump, Roe v Wade in all likelihood would be the law the land still, and for a lot of Americans that is a distinct shift shift in the options legally allowed to them for a major life decision. Hell, having to move, like you argued, is a major quality of life change.
Once again, I understand that your life or my life has been no different under different administrations, but that isn't true for a lot of people.
The Scotus of the 1970s passed Roe v Wade. The Scotus of 2021 reversed it. At one point in our country's history, the SCOTUS declare that black people were 3/5 of a person. At some point later in time, they said race segregated schools were just fine if "separate but equal". At some point in time (even later) the SCOTUS held that it was permissible to involuntarily sterilize certain people ("three generations of idiots is enough"). The SCOTUS is well known to make terrible decisions, and later reverse them (or Congress reverses them, which is how it should be). Roe was one of them IF you think the SCOTUS should follow the actual constitution (which says nothing about abortion. nothing), as opposed to politics. States have had their own abortion laws all along.
Unreasonable abortion restrictions are a way for republicans to lose elections. But passing reasonable abortion laws (and moving on already) is a loser for democrats, since then they could not rally behind abortion.
Pick the state you want to live in based on your own criteria. I live in Wyoming (after 50+ years in California). I don't like some of Wyoming's laws/policies, because IMO they are stupidly repressive due to overt Mormon influence (not as bad as Utah or Idaho, but still) . But, I knew that before I moved there. Anyone with an internet connection can know this in 15 minutes. But, other things I liked were more important to me. Looking back at California, I can say the same thing in reverse. There were things I liked about CA policies, and things I greatly disliked.
Way she goes.
The SCOTUS is appointed by the President.
Once again I having nothing against you saying that presidential elections do not impact your life significantly... clearly they impact other people's lives.
Given the circumstances I probably have some more nerves to be irritated, but the 3/5 clause is in the Consititution itself. SCOTUS did not have to say a thing about that. In Dred Scott the Court said that Black people were not citizens of the United States.
It’s worse. It would have been a great election issue. The Republicans were scared and offered major concessions right out of the box. The Democrats were in a great position to negotiate something that would lock these rights in, but instead they chose to put up an unpassable ideological statement and now we have a big mess. The women involved in this fiasco live in liberal states and they have all their rights, but they have left poor women in conservative states out to dry with their political malpractice.
Team Stupid cannot compete with Team Evil.
In fact Trump appointed the Supreme Court justices who kicked abortion policy down to the states instead of mandating its legality at the federal level.
Exactly this! The only phrase I take issue with is this one, which holds soft expectations for the people of Palestine: "despite playing no role in the October 7 attacks". In order for a Palestinian state to exist and thrive it must be able to resist, overthrow, and exclude extreme groups like Hamas.
Give them the dignity of being responsible for their own house.
They may have played "no role" but there was no shortage of gleeful celebration when Hamas was parading corpses around Gaza that day.
Would you say the same of the North Korean people? They seem pretty analogous to me, just that the Kims have lasted much longer than Hamas
Maybe. It's a deep topic.
Since Oct 7th I became a lot more pro-Israel than before (was nearly 100% neutral just due to historical complexity and distance). The reason is Substackers and others started revealing just how incredibly pro-Hamas and anti-semitic the Gazan population actually is. Hamas isn't some tiny regime that manages to somehow oppress millions of innocents despite having nearly no state infrastructure. They don't need an advanced secret police or surveillance infrastructure, because it seems most Gazans are on their side anyway. There is lots of evidence of this like opinion polls, the way Hamas fighters operate with impunity inside hospitals, the dancing in the streets around the captured hostages, the apparent lack of resistance movements or collaborators who would otherwise help the Israelis overthrow Hamas in return for independence and so on.
This really shook my world view of what dictatorships are like. In the west we like to imagine that totalitarian regimes are made up of a tiny number of thugs at the top, and then millions of innocent people below them who strive for freedom and western values but can't organize due to the ruthless efficiency of some abstract state oppression.
It's easy to forget that regimes are large. Regimes need lots of people to make them work. You can't organize a regime without a LOT of people who really want to take part in it, who share the goals of that regime. With Hamas this is obvious: they sustain a massive fighting force on the back of a small population, implying that most Gazans are either fighters or directly supporting fighters (families, businesses helping the fighters etc). The separation of Gazans and Hamas that underlies the leftist cause might not really exist.
So how many North Koreans are true believers? What percentage of the population are fellow travellers who would try and resurrect the communist state if it were suddenly taken away from them? Today we can ignore this question because it's irrelevant. If North Korea collapsed it would become a much more important question. But it is surely not less than 20% of the population.
At what point does fixing this become the responsibility of people on the inside? Unclear but the bulk of the work must ultimately lie with them.
Hamas are junkyard dogs. A meaner Palestinian version of the IRA (Northern Ireland), that shoot rockets because the Wall prevents them from setting bombs. They're the toughest gang of thugs in the giant open-air prison camp known as Gaza. They rule it with an iron hand, and will kill anyone who challenges their rule.
Gangs aspire to become organized crime, that aspire to become official leadership--if given the chance. A phenomenon that happens in ghettos, reservations, prison camps since time immemorial.
Total Israeli exports 2022, USD $76.9 billion. Palestinian exports 2022, $1.58 billion. Israeli policy squelches free enterprise and entrepreneurialism in the Occupied Territories. Easier to control the natives when they're poor.
The new left are basically hipster MAGAs.
This is very much correct in that MAGA is basically a lifestyle brand, "Free Palestine" has become a lifestyle brand for weirdo leftists.
I do think the New Left is very much about lifestyle more than policy. I think their real goal is power and the like, and they don’t care anything at all about the policies or people they claim to care about.
From 2015-20 they thought they were the future, and then when the 2020 SC/Super Tuesday primaries hit their future came to a crashing end. The Bernie wing of the movement dumped the Bernie Bros, and went with the Dem Party. Embracing Gaza was their way of climbing back into the mainstream but they don’t care about the Palestinians anymore than they care about working class people or Ukraine.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/putins-war-and-the-chaos-climbers
Got news for you: the "new left" is now mainstream Democratic politics. Actual Biden Administration policy. The entire Biden 2020 plank was copied almost entirely from Sanders' 2016 campaign: Free College, $15 Minimum Wage, Legalizing Marijuana, Criminal Justice Reform, Renewable Energy, and addressing Income Inequality. Throw in protecting a woman's right to choose and you've got current center-of-the-road Dem.
How's that is any way MAGA?
Israel's current--and entirely self-inflicted--PR nightmare will not and cannot be fixed by demonizing a few hundred college demonstrators. Deliberately using famine as a weapon of war will haunt both Israel and the American pro-Israel movement for decades to come. They've dug themselves a very deep hole, and every new photo of starving Gazan children that emerges only deepens it. Some of them eerily look like photos of Nazi death camp survivors.
lol no it really wasn’t. In 2020 the Bernie wing of his movement rolled back into the Democratic Party where they occupied the wing people like McGovern and Ted Kennedy used to occupy while the Bernie bros or dirtbag left veered off. Thats what Noah calls the new left or I call the alt left or OWS left.
Every country should work to reduce their dependence on oil imports as much as possible. We don't want our economies dependent on the drama of the Middle East.
Yep.
My hope is that China's drive towards energy independence will drive India's drive towards the same goal which will also drive the same behaviour in ASEAN and Europe. In the big four attempting this goal, commodities prices will fall and other developing countries can also leverage new energy technologies.
A fracking boom could make sense for China given their enormous and sparsely populated hinterlands. But not for India. Too much population density.
They would need American expertise to do that which the Biden administration is unlikely to let them do. Also intuitively it seems easier to build transmission lines than a pipeline, but I'm not an expert. Additionally since Chinese solar manufacturers might get hit with tariffs soon, the government is going to speed up deployment to support domestic industry.
Yeah. I'm a eco modernist and even I thought the decision was retarded. We need to systematically destroy the petrostates of the world.
It's not called a Strategic Resource for nothing. Keeping a petroleum reserve for wartime use is essential. Which is why the Alaska decision shouldn't be conflated with fracking-generated LNG in the lower 48.
Biden emptied the reserve to bring gas prices down. Is it filled back up again?
I agree with most of your analysis. However, I think IDF operations are being held to an unreasonable standard. No wars incur zero civilian casualties. When we compare civilian casualties caused by the IDF with other major wars, the civilian-to-combatant casualty rate is unprecedentedly low.
I remember during the 2014 Gaza war, an Israeli general was quoted (anonymously) as saying "the Americans would never tolerate this, as we have. They would bring out the B52's and level the place". I think this is profoundly true. We have never had a military aristocracy, there is no question of honor, just of expediency: how do we win this war as fast as possible?" This could be productively applied to this case: war is bad, starting a war is bad, ending a war is good. Nothing else matters. Letting this go on and on is not doing the Palestinians any favors: it simply delays the point at which they decide that this war is not worth it, that they love their children more.
Had we lost WW2, US & British bomber generals would've be tried as war criminals for the fire-bombings of Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, etc. that mostly killed women and children.
During and after the First Gulf War, we and the Brits systematically bombed the shit out of Iraq's infrastructure. Then we imposed a near total blockade of spare parts to repair said infrastructure. The result was a near collapse of Iraq's sewage treatment plants. An estimated 250k Iraqis--mostly the very young and the very old--died as a result of diarrheal diseases. So, yeah, we're assholes.
That's true. But we didn't lose. Germany and Japan are peaceful and prosperous countries today because we did what we did. We rid the world of extraordinary dangerous regimes whose ideologized populations killed millions of innocents. We paid for this in hundreds of thousands of our lives. We are heroes for that.
As for Iraq, I notice that you don't mention the gangster militias who destroyed their own country and committed mass atrocities starting immediately in the wake of the invasion. This catastrophe should have been foreseen, and we should not have started that war. That's on us. But surely even Arabs can be held responsible for the things they actually did.
Decent people don't respect people who trash their own country and their own fellow citizens to make themselves more socially appealing. It's a parlor game, but with serious consequences.
To blame the Sunni-Shia-Kurd civil war violence on Iraqi "gangsters" is pretty rich, when it was we who lit the match in rather spectacular fashion. If you wish, I could detail the various examples of staggering incompetence a certain GOP administration made in its adventures there that virtually guaranteed--if not accelerated--the scope of the violence. Fighting that unnecessarily cost the US lives and treasure, not to mention up to 1.25m Iraqi lives, and inundated the EU with >2 million refugees.
Your Germany/Japan analogies are entirely correct. After killing perhaps 4.5 million civilians we did turn them into peaceful and prosperous democratic Satrapies. Israel, however, has no such intention regarding their own conquered territories. An eternity of military rule in grinding poverty is all their residents have to look forward to, along with slow-motion ethnic cleansing by the apartheid settler movement. Is it any wonder they rebelled against the Israeli boot on their neck?
Regarding a few hundred non-violent demonstrating college students, what's the big fuss? Their only crime is to have touched a nerve with the pro-Israel crowd who dislike being reminded that a maybe/maybe-not-yet genocide is currently being waged in their name. And if the ongoing famine proceeds as intended later this summer into a mass-fatality event, and photos of thousands of dead emaciated Gazan children who look eerily like Auschwitz victims start hitting the airwaves, then Israel and the pro-Israel movement will be in an epic PR disaster that may never, ever be fixable. In that light, all those arrested and expelled college kids will be redeemed; even seen as martyrs.
Even if the Gaza situation doesn't worsen, Israel and Zionism have lost the American youth. People my age still reflexively stand with Israel; but the under-30 crowd is lost. Perhaps forever. To them, calling in the cops to campus simply worsens the reputation of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, and validates their belief that Zionism is just a system of racist thuggery.
What I especially take issue with, is that if this famine disaster comes to pass, it will return Trump to the WH, and the GOP to the Senate; and severely reduce American soft power internationally. American democracy as we know it may end. And for what? Just so that the Israeli government can proceed with yet another stage of its ethnic cleansing program?
I can only observe that Israel losing the support of the United States will not be better for the Palestinians. Alone, the Israelis are much more dangerous to them than they have been under United States support and restraint. The logic in this situation would be to just finish the Palestinian situation off for good. Many countries would celebrate this: indeed, if the Israelis don't do it, someone else likely will. Having made themselves a danger to world peace with this atrocity, I give the Palestinian national existence a generation, tops. The only question is how many individual Palestinians will survive to tend to the lives and futures of their children, as they should have been doing all along. With luck there will be many.
Israel's exports 2023: $156billion; Palestine's: $1.61 billion. As long as Israel keeps their borders tightly closed, the Palestinian business class will never be able to flourish to become a counterweight to Hamas/PA.
Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7th were horrible, killing 1,200 Israelis. But Israel has already killed >30,000 civilians and most of the Hamas fighters (20,000 ?).
> the fire-bombings of Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, etc. that mostly killed women and children.
The Nazis tried this defense in court and had it rejected.
That's because they lost. If they'd won, Le May and the other bomber command generals would've hung.
Cope.
Whataboutism
https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1782757361175642336
Can you tell me the ratios of this conflict, and of other conflicts? I don’t know how to compare these casualties, but it sounds like you do have the numbers handy!
https://www.newsweek.com/israel-implemented-more-measures-prevent-civilian-casualties-any-other-nation-history-opinion-1865613
https://twitter.com/AppgIsrael/status/1755645773612494980
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio
That Wikipedia article shocked me. I assumed that the Hamas attack had a worse ratio than the Israeli response, but it seems to be saying that both killed 2 civilians for every 1 military death. Neither of those is particularly on the low end, but I had assumed before that Hamas at least was worse than Israel. You now seem to be saying they are doing similarly badly/well.
It’s intellectually dishonest to equate house-by-house rape and torture of civilians with unintentional civilian deaths caused by Hamas using civilians as human shields.
“In the special case of Gaza, moreover, the crowded urban battlefield offers endless opportunities for the easiest of tactics, because contrary to accusations that only expensively educated U.S. college students could possibly believe, Israeli soldiers do not deliberately kill innocent civilians going about their business. Therefore Hamas fighters can be perfect civilians walking alongside women and children right up until the moment they duck into the right doorway to take up prepared weapons and come out shooting.“
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-winning-gaza
That seems right. Still, I was under the impression that the vast majority of Hamas killings had been civilians - now I learn that it's actually no larger than the ratio of Israeli killings.
I think it's relevant that Hamas killed a lot of soldiers that came rushing in, in uniform, to fight them off.
On the other side, Hamas hides in tunnels or among the civilians and wear no uniforms.
Seems like very different circumstances. I don't think civilian casualty ratios are very useful when comparing very different fronts.
Keep in mind that if Bibi continues his food blockade of six months and counting, the number of dead Gazans will skyrocket. And those who survive will be physiologically and psychologically scarred for life. After breaking UNWRA, driving out nonprofits like World Central Kitchen, and eliminating the Gazan police who used to escort food convoys, Israel has set in motion a possibly unstoppable mass-casualty catastrophe.
Ironically, the founders of Israel--many of whom were concentration camp survivors--were also survivors of intentional starvation.
So 12,000 Hamas have been killed and 24,000 civilians? What is your source here other than that tweet?
24,000 is the number of women and children killed. They are implausibly assuming every adult man killed was Hamas.
I think so too. But it does seem to me like Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties while simultaneously leveling Gaza to the ground. Which is kind of a neat trick.
I am really surprised we haven't seen famine in North Gaza. How is food aid getting to them?
The people moved to the south, and Israel lets food and other aid through. But then it sits on the ground being undistributed, apparently, so there might be famine yet. It won't be due to lack of food but distribution issues.
Kenny, are you familiar with A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry (ACOUP)? It's a wonderful blog by a military historian, Brett Devereaux. Here's an informative post on civilian casualties in war, historically and today: https://acoup.blog/2023/12/08/fireside-friday-december-8-2023/
I've read some of his posts in the past, but hadn't seen this one!
A wonderful overview.
The elite colleges are losing their donor class billionaires and such, while gaining absolutely nothing for the fling. Was in college in the late 60's, early 70's, and thought back then, the Presidents needed to get real with the protestors. They didn't and college ceased to be a search for truth and became a means of well paid jobs and fund raising. That is no way to educate a nation.
The US wasn’t concerned about standoff attacks in Fallujah, or when the US idiotically allied itself with Iran’s Shia Islamist proxies in fighting ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa. It's also incorrect to compare October 7 to the Ukraine war - Russia didn't start that war with atrocities like a cross-border attack intentionally targeting thousands of civilians with torture, rape, sadistic executions and abductions. October 7 is far more like September 11, and I'll remind you, since you're so concerned about casualty ratios, that the US killed far more civilians as it was justly pursuing the destruction of Al Qaeda, after suffering 3000 victims in the Islamist terror attacks of 9/11, than Israel has killed Palestinian civilians in its just pursuit of destroying Hamas.
Nobody serious can consider Mousa Al-Gharbi as anything but an anti-Israel propagandist. The proof that his theory is idiotic gaslighting is how many anti-jewish attacks are happening across the US and EU, diaspora Jews being attacked by Muslims and far leftists. I've never seen far-right protests attacking Jewish students daily on hundreds of university campuses, and Jewish businesses and places of worship all around the US.
There's an interesting statistical trick played where "right-wing antisemitism" is not defined as antisemitism (eg: hate crimes) by people who self-affiliate with the Republican Party but people who give conservative answers on issue surveys. You wouldn't call them leftists, more conservative Democrats, but the mere fact of being a Democrat means that calling it a systematically "right-wing" problem is straight lying: if you have 10 Democrats in a room and one of them is a Nazi, you have 10 Nazis.
Noah, you didn’t mention the American hostages, no one does, not even the President. Is it because you don’t care?
Here they are. Edan Alexander, Itai Chen, Sagui Dekel-Chen, Omer Neutra, Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Keith Siegel.
You’re supposed to be a math guy.
In terms of population the hostages that were take, if the same representative number of hostages were taken in the united states it would be around 7000. The number of dead? About 40,000.
What is anti-semitic is the world expecting Israel to go over an above what other countries are expected to do, had there countries been savagely ravaged. You put a blame on Israels behavior.
Let’s look at that. Do you see Israeli citizens dancing in the streets over the death of Palestinians? I don’t, but I sure saw Palestinians on Oct. 7th dance. The mothers and fathers who received the videos of their sons killing Jews, they sure were celebrating
.
Can you tell me exactly who is in charge of the Palestinian Peace movement? Who is the Palestinian Mandela or Gandhi or even who their MLK is? I can’t. Can you tell me, how many times Arab Nations tried to eradicate Israel? How many Jews have been killed by Palestinian Terrorists? School buses raked by gunfire? An Olympic Team kidnapped and killed? How many suicide bombers killed?
While we can of course discuss the lproblems of settlements, and it is destabilizing, why is the behavior of Palestinians never discussed?
Had something similar happened in America with the numbers I expressed above, just how would expect America to act. We leveled Iraq and Afghanistan over a few thousand....Imagine if 40,000 had been killed. As for the poor Palestinians, they voted in Hamas. They dance in the streets....I remember a photo in Gaza of a group of 6 year olds in Hamas garb, I believe there were meant to die for Allah.
Their parents did this.....The Palestinians haven’t exactly dropped themselves in responsible and sincere behavior. There leaders have consistently called for the destruction of Israel in Arabic while making peaceful pronouncements in English to satisfy the stupid Americans and Europeans so they keep sending money.
The Palestinians do not want Peace, they want to see the death of Jews. It’s what they have wanted for decades. When you find that Palestinian Peace movement, lemme know. I’ve been waiting for one since 1967.
Your Steelman argument is "Israel has done bad things to the Palestinian people, which is bad, and not what the US would do." I think the steelman argument that moves people to protest is that Israel has been using this tragedy to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank, including using famine as a weapon of collective punishment. For what its worth, Israel has also killed multiple US citizens in this war.
Israel is one of the US's closest allies, and the US continues its military support to this day, a clear endorsement the their actions. This seems to be putting US citizens and military abroad at greater risk with no clear benefit to the US.
Also, your claim that Palestinian demands for the right of return represents "a call for a return to the law of the jungle, where nations press ancient land claims with invasion, ethnic cleansing and genocide"? Noah there are people still alive who were forced from their homes in 1948, that's hardly an "ancient land claim". Wouldn't that be the Israeli claim to the land which is based off religious texts thousands of years old?
The Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries waged a genocidal war against Israel in 1948. That Palestinian population that fled or retreated will not be returning, there is a consequence for losing wars. The Indian Muslims, Pakistani Hindus and Sudeten Germans will also not be returning to the places they came from.
"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
One hell of a moral philosophy.
Thucydides knew a lot about war, including the fact that soft intellectuals idea of moral philosophy is not part of it. This was his whole point. If you want an American expression of it, it is: “War is hell. It is cruelty and you cannot refine it.”
Thanks for the thoughtful and carefully reasoned comment. I really appreciate the effort you have put into this.
Sudeten Germans were expelled at about the same time as Palestinians. The Czech Republic joined the Schengen region in 2007 and now Germans can go back if they want to. It's possible to move on from past grievances.
The Sudeten Germans have never been compensated for their expropriated possessions or pain and suffering.
I doubt the Poles will be compensating their expelled Germans any time soon, either.
Putin's Russia is even now "compensating" the population of Ukraine for the Holodomor.
One difference is that the Sudeten Germans had a Germany to go to: what makes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict so intractable is that _both_ sides believe they have no homeland other than the one they're fighting over.
India has 200 million + Muslims because it is constitutionally (for now) a modern secular state.
You mean the Muslims who were leftover in India after the partition and population transfers that are estimated to have killed a million people? Let me know when the Indian government welcomes the Muslims who were moved to Pakistan back, I'm sure it will be happening any day now.
In Israel, there are 2 million Arab citizens. They enjoy more political rights than any other Arab in the Middle East, simply because Israel is the only liberal democracy in the region. Today, an Israeli IDF Muslim Arab soldier was killed in the war in Gaza, and quite a few such soldiers have already been killed while fighting for Israel. Hamas murdered and kidnapped many Israeli Arab civilians on October 7.
If Israel kills every single last Hamas fighter, nobody will miss them. Even most Arab states dislike or barely tolerate the Palestinians.
But if Israel crosses the line into genocide--as it seems to want to--will create a moral and diplomatic stain that will be impossible to wash out. Policies to intentionally starve to death a population of 2.3 million civilians--half of them children--even if only partly successful, will be an absolute catastrophe for Israel.
No one in Israel speaks about genocide. It is a left-wing conspiracy or fantasy.
Most of the right wing parties in Israel speak of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Judah and Samaria. They represent about 30% of Jewish citizens. Some politicians do in fact speak openly of genocide, but they are the fringe.
There have been, and are frequent crimes and communal riots against Indian Muslims. The current government stokes this with inflammatory statements. "Constitutional secularism" can't do much about this.
It's awful and it is stupid and Hindutva is a scourge. But the point is that he was using a false example.
Why is it false? Is the difference even significant?
Does that justify Israel currently waging a possibly genocidal war against Gaza? Of the 2.3 million Gazans who are being intentionally starved to death, about a million are children. Is this something you advocate?
You are saying things that are not connected to reality. Gaza has the cheapest food prices in the Middle East because they are flooded with humanitarian aid. It is true that there was a period when Hamas took control of the food trucks in Rafah before they reached the north of the Strip, causing famine in the north of the Strip. Israel opened a crossing in the north of the Strip and the problem was solved.
Are they using famine as collective punishment though? They've been allowing a lot of food trucks through that aren't getting distributed on the Gazan side because the UN isn't distributing it. Why not, well, maybe because UNRWA is full of Hamas supporters and Hamas seem to consistently use Gazans as pawns in the war. It helps Hamas to have Gazans be starving because it inflames leftists in the west, so why distribute food? Better to leave it sitting in cargo yards:
https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1781291002059211263
(yes I am citing the IDF on this deliberately)
Yes Israeli leadership such as Yoav Gallant were quite clear about that and the onset of the war (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-defense-minister-orders-complete-siege-on-gaza-after-hamas-surprise-attack). Israel has also yet to produce evidence to support their claims about UNRWA (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/22/unrwa-israel-hamas-report-palestinians/).
The UN has repeatedly issued findings that Israel is blocking aid shipments into Gaza (https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/04/1148141).
Targeting the largest relief agency in Gaza as well as international NGOs (such as the strike on World Central Kitchen) while imposing a blockade of food and electricity, clearly demonstrates that Israel is using famine as a weapon.
(Not sure why I'm supposed to be impressed with citing the IDF?)
So you're asserting the photos of food cargo waiting to be distributed inside Gaza is all lies and propaganda then, and in reality aid shipments are all being turned around at the border? Can you show that is the case? Who are the aid agencies that are being shown being delivered through then, do they not really exist at all?
I wouldn't put too much stock any IDF statements, btw. They're fighting a war and will say pretty much anything at this point.
The point is that if the current food blockade devolves into a mass-casualty event, with thousands of photos of dead or dying Gazan children looking like emaciated Nazi death camp inmates, Israel will be in enormously deep shit. A hole so deep, that not even light will escape it. The fallout from Sabra & Shatila will look utterly tame by comparison.
Israeli leadership either doesn't know, or doesn't care. Given the public comments by Smotrich et al, the money's on 'doesn't care'.
The "ancient land claim" argument implies that one set of people on the ground should expel and murder another set of people on the ground simply because they don't want to live among them. This is pretty much how racial segregation happened in the United States, and is the foundation of endless barbaric acts in history. Is this what you call "civilized"?
I do wonder how much protesters grapple with the not unlikely outcome that an American break-up with Israel could mean a more brutal Israeli reckoning with Palestine.
What can be "more brutal" than deliberately starving to death 2.3 million civilians? Half of them children.
An American break-up would have the opposite effect. Without US diplomatic cover, Israel would've suffered a similar outcome as apartheid South Africa. Like decades ago.
While that is a possibility.. I think you're far too confident. The current trend of Geopolitics is towards bloc conflict... if the US drops Israel, it's fairly likely that Russia or China is willing to adopt them. After all, Russia is bedfellows w/ Assad, who has been just as brutal if not more so than Israel. If you want to know what is more brutal than the hypothetical of 2.3 million civilians dying... it would be 2.3 million civilians actually dying. I do not deny the brutality of the Israeli actions, but to imagine it can not get worse is highly naive.
Unfortunately South Africa is not a good analogue. Pressure against South Africa occurred during a unipolar moment, with a group in power that was outnumbered and had limited options. Israel of today is in a different situation, and if we're assessing possible future outcomes, we need to be open to the idea that the US might be a restraining influence on Israel, and that removing that influence could lead to worse rather than better outcomes for Palestinians.
It might have a paradoxical result, in that freeing Israel to beat the Palestinians into submission would end the war so that future Palestinian generations can tend to their lives and families in peace.
Pretty much agreed.
I started reading “Invisible Bridge”, btw, and despite the illuminating narrative, it really comes across as “bitter Boomer leftist grievance on crack”.
I thought it felt like a historian who started off trying to chronicle a movement he thought was bad, and ended up sympathizing with that movement more than he expected to.
Huh. I thought you already knew the full Perlstein arc:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/magazine/i-thought-i-understood-the-american-right-trump-proved-me-wrong.html
The portrait of Reagan in that book is certainly more multidimensional than the Reagan I remember being president (the Bork hearings were a fundamental political experience for me in high school). But the contemporary political parallels weren't as obvious as in "Nixonland" so Perlstein could tell himself that it was important that the readers understood what early Reagan supporters thought and felt.
This is what happpens to biographers all the time. One just cannot help going native at some stage.
I felt similarly through a lot of Nixonland
Or Trumpland. Especially this latest hush money trial. Who wouldn't pay $160,000 in hush money to cover up a fling with a porno-actress? And then falsify records to make it out as a business expense?